Comments

CD 498
I would argue that desecrating a memorial is a separate thing. The act would still carry its meaning even if the memorial in question hadn’t contained a body (indeed, if the cemetery is old enough odds are good it didn’t anymore). Had he chosen a Holocaust memorial rather than a graveyard, he’d have sent the same message. This sort of thing is really one of those cases where context really does matter too. It could be argued that pissing (or fake pissing) on the grave is totally on him, but photographing it and distributing them was clearly intended as a shot at the Jewish community, and there should be a way to make that fall under some type of harassment statute.

Crip Dyke*,
Ah, that is interesting. And not because I feel that the dead should have rights, but because the act was specifically targeting the living– I think that in NY, there could be a case for that to be prosecuted as hate crime. Ain’t antisemitism grand?

Not-Max is doing great! She’s tall and smart (17 months old and already using sentences!) and although times have been a little tough for Mr Alexandra and I, we’re making the best of it.

*tackle hugs!* I miss you and I wish I had more time to comment. I’m around today because I’m sick and my MiL is watching Not-Max today. Have I passed along my email?

*My autocorrect want to change your name to “dropsy”. O.o

Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaidensays

Kroos Control has made assertions several times but failed to provide any evidence or reasoning. For instance, he asserts that “Objective moral values exist’. His reasoning is nothing more than ‘objective morality exists bc I perceive that it exists’. At this point I seriously question his ability to make coherent arguments .

I have been making cogent and devastating arguments , but you and the other have not been able to address them. As I said multiple times before. How do you anything objectively exists? How do you know your computer objectively exists? Because you perceive it! The burden of proof is on the skeptic to prove that people’s perception is wrong and noone here has been able to bring any evidence people should not trust their perceptions.

@Tony!

I’m sure William Lane Craig has an answer for Alexandra’s question. You love using his poor arguments and bad reasoning as a substitute for you expressing and supporting opinions of your own.

1) William Lane Craig is a brilliant and influential intellectual with well-reasoned arguments
2) I do have my own opinions , even if they have been influenced by different philosophers and intellectuals I have read
3) I don’t know if he’s ever written on this topic, but I’m perfectly able to make arguments on my own.

How do you anything objectively exists? How do you know your computer objectively exists? Because you perceive it!

Again, just because you declare there is a sense of morality that is comparable to our physical senses doesn’t make it show. Either show your work or shut the fuck up. We know how our other senses work biologically. We have confirmed that they are relatively reliable and know how and why they fuck up. Until you can do the same for your Objective Morality Detector, you’ve got no fucking case.

but photographing it and distributing them was clearly intended as a shot at the Jewish community, and there should be a way to make that fall under some type of harassment statute.

Or, you know, we follow the Enlightenment values on government restrictions free speech, which specifically include the idea that merely being offensive is insufficient grounds to use force to silence someone. Making material available online is not harassment. Maybe if he specifically mailed photos of peeing on the hypothetical holocaust memorial to Jews, then that might be harassment. Did he do that in this case? Or did he just publish it on his blog or facebook or something?

Note that I’m merely arguing what I think is the best law, not whether it is moral to do such a thing, nor whether it’s ok to criticize such a person for doing such a thing.

tl;dr Mere publication of the photos should be legal. Mere publication is not moral. (“Don’t be a dick.”) We should criticize such a person.

How do you anything objectively exists? How do you know your computer objectively exists? Because you perceive it! The burden of proof is on the skeptic to prove that people’s perception is wrong and noone here has been able to bring any evidence people should not trust their perceptions.

I understand if you don’t want to read my wall of text. Let me do the short version.

When I perceive this chair on which I sit, I can come to the conclusion of the existence of an object (“chair”) in our shared (material) reality. I do not come to any conclusions about what should be done with the chair.

Suppose we lived in a hypothetical world where we all had this “morality sense” in a manner like what you propose. Suppose we all had this tingly sensation which instinctively made us feel icky when we saw a baby being murdered. With this, and additional information consistent with the narrative, it would be proper to conclude that there is something of our shared reality outside the conventional material. This would be the rational and scientific conclusion. However, to jump to “it makes me feel icky” to “it is wrong” is jumping the is-ought gap, and that is something you cannot do.

If you had such a feeling, such a sense, it is begging the question to call it a “morality sense”. I have nothing a priori against there being a sense similar in description to what you describe, but I object in strong terms that you can go from “we have this new sense which partially maps onto conventional western morality” to “we should behave according to this sense”.

We agree on our framing of epistemology, esp. w.r.t. justifications and axiomatic frameworks. Suppose we have this sense. Why should we follow its dictates? What justification do you have for that? That is the mistake that you are making, even by your own rules.

Sorry KC, you have been making inane, stupid, and unevidenced assertions which are dismissed, as they lack evidence.
You only make cogent and devastating arguments when [link] to the evidence appears, and actually backs what you say, and said evidence is something other than philosophic/theological bullshit.
Like this: Evidence for evolution, Lenski 1, Lenski 2, natural selection Schneider, even a thirteen-year-old refuting Therapeutic Touch/Reiki. Take it out of your philosophy and do a reality check comic. Until then, dismissed.

I think the circumstances surrounding pregnancy are unique and as such the analogy you make with organ donation is not quite equal to poisoning/dismembering a foetus/baby in the womb.
I know that’s unlikely to be unconvincing to you. Essentially you asked ” Why is this an exception? ” and I said “because it is a unique case”**

You’ve been tight-lipped about your views on bodily autonomy.
You mentioned certain American laws. In certain states there are laws against a pregnant woman abusing certain harmful substances that can cause birth defects , developmental disorders and mental retardation in the baby. In your view is this OK, or does bodily autonomy imply the woman allowed to do whatever she likes regardless of the consequences to the foetus/baby?

**Also I agree corpses shouldn’t have rights. Give their organs to someone who needs it more.

I think the circumstances surrounding pregnancy are unique and as such the analogy you make with organ donation is not quite equal to poisoning/dismembering a foetus/baby in the womb.
I know that’s unlikely to be unconvincing to you. Essentially you asked ” Why is this an exception? ” and I said “because it is a unique case”**

So, what is it that makes it a unique case? It can’t be the poisoning, since I suppose you’re sane enough to realize the problem if you claim that position. The same is the case with dismembering and obviously appealing to the status of the fetus only confirms the idea that you’re granting the fetus greater rights than grown human beings.

So, I’m left with the location. As far as I can tell, there’s something special about the womb, that disables the rights of the person whose womb it is. Effectively, the womb doesn’t count as part of a person’s body when considering bodily autonomy. Is that your position? If not, what is?

KC:
What exactly is unique about pregnancy? 51% of the population has or has had the ability to become pregnant. That’s the opposite of “unique”.

You haven’t proven that a fetus deserves more rights and your declaration that pregnancy is “unique” doesn’t make it so. What about a fetus gives it specific protections that we don’t grant to born people?

Let me be clear , I’m speaking to more of an ontological account of morality wrt God as opposed to an epistemological account.
Epistemology only came up because of “How would we know” if objective morals exist questions were asked.
wrt objective morality my view is more like (3)
I think your challenge is not very good. I can think of a world where objective reality does not exist and it is all an illusion of consciousness. This world would look the same as ours to the conscious observer. But does this mean that objective reality does not exist? I can conceive of a version of you that is a philosophical zombie, that looks and behaves teh same but has no conscious experience. Does that mean your consciousness does not exist?

I think we can trust this “moral sense” in the same way we trust our sense experience or our intuitions regarding the existence of physical reality and the existence of other minds.
I think I am as certain that it is wrong to kill babies for fun , as I am of the fact that other minds exist.
You can imagine a world where it is false , but that possibility does not make it true and the burden of proof is on the skeptic to provide a defeater for this sense.

Even if you pursue the causality angle, you’re still playing God of the Gaps. Causality is a principle within the universe, not of the universe.

Craig call this the taxicab fallacy. you agree that causality applies for things in the universe , but once the implications become inconvenient for you , you abandon it like a taxicab There’s no reason to believe its not true of the universe.

This is how I see it. Let’s consider a classic view of time. Either time is bounded in the past, or it isn’t. If time is bounded in the past, either there is a first time, or there isn’t. If there is a first time, either there is a cause which does not precede it in time, or there isn’t. That’s a lot of branches.

Kroos Control argues that it’s not fair to be dubious of the extrapolation and induction that because everything we see has a cause, thus everything we see has a cause. My counter is: Why aren’t you more dubious about your a-temporal cause? All the causes we’ve ever see are inside of time and temporally precede the thing they cause. Both choices are seemingly silly and unprecedented: things and causes outside of time, or something without a cause. At least, they’re both equally preposterous to me. Why do you think one is less preposterous?

Even then, you’re ignoring a couple of the branches above, such as a bound on time in the past, but no first time. It’s mathematically describable, consistent, etc. Ex: t∈{x|x∈R∧x>0}

I also honestly see nothing wrong with time being unbounded in the past, at least a priori, and the physics seems currently undecided. Worse, it may wrong to model time classically as I do here.

Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaidensays

I’m speaking to more of an ontological account of morality wrt God as opposed to an epistemological account.

Ontology isolated from epistemology is useless wanking.

How do you anything objectively exists? How do you know your computer objectively exists? Because you perceive it!

Nope. If you perceive it you cannot say honestly that it “objectively” exists. You can only say that it exists within the limits of your perception. Depending on circumstance you may accept that as “good enough” to behave as if it did in fact exist. But if you are honest, you will always acknowledge the possibility that it does not in fact exist in the manner that you perceive it to exist.

To prove that it objectively exists you must obtain corroborating evidence external to your own perceptions.

Your arguments are getting sillier and sillier and lamer and lamer with every passing post.

Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaidensays

You can imagine a world where it is false , but that possibility does not make it true and the burden of proof is on the skeptic to provide a defeater for this sense.

The burden of proof is only on the skeptic if you have tested the “morality sense” and proven it generally reliable on not just ethical questions, but on questions of meta-ethics.

Something you have consistently elided is your “perception” of morality/ethics and your “perception” that such morality/ethics are objective.

If you can’t prove you have a meta-ethical sense that answers questions correctly absent specific disfunctions the way that we can prove humans have visual senses that answer questions correctly absent specific disfunctions, hen you are merely

imagining a world where [objective morality] is true. But that possibility doesn’t make it true and the burden of proof is on the objectivist.

One who asserts has the burden of proof. You have asserted the objectivity of morality, and further that you have a meta-morality sense that enables you to “directly perceive” the objectiveness/non-objectiveness of specific [proposed] moral imperatives.

The fact that you liken your imagination to perception doesn’t make your imagination perception, and thus default trust of perceptions is not applicable unless and until you prove this sense. We are not proposing that you not trust your perceptions. We are noting that you have yet to make any case at all that humans have a morality sensory organ, **MUCH LESS** a meta-morality sensory organ.

I think your challenge is not very good. I can think of a world where objective reality does not exist and it is all an illusion of consciousness. This world would look the same as ours to the conscious observer. But does this mean that objective reality does not exist? I can conceive of a version of you that is a philosophical zombie, that looks and behaves teh same but has no conscious experience. Does that mean your consciousness does not exist?

I do not understand what you mean when you say that “my consciousness exists”. I’m with Dan Dennett that philosophical zombies are at least borderline incoherent, and arguably actually incoherent.

Your objective morality is even worse. At least my mind is accessible to me – presumably. Your objective morality would be inaccessible to everyone. It’s the age old question – what difference is there between a dragon in your garage which is invisible, intangible, heatless, etc., and no dragon at all?http://www.godlessgeeks.com/LINKS/Dragon.htm

I cannot talk to you about your garage dragon (objective morality) until you at least sufficiently define it that I might be able to distinguish its truth from its falseness. You have not given me a way to do so. At best, you have defined terms to be true completely apart from observation, experience, and logic, and thus I literally do not understand what you are talking about.

Because I know you’re going to go there, let me preempt you. Logic and math are formal systems. They are fictions created by humans. The number “1” does not exist. It is a fiction we use. It has formal rules which can be applied unambiguously by any fair person to arrive at the same conclusions, and thus it is highly convenient means of communication, and a highly useful – precise and accurate – means of description. I understand what it means for “1+1=2″ to be true, but only in the context of ZF or some other axiomatic framework which is already accepted to be true.

So, you are able to make math claims to me, and I understand what the word “truth” means of math and logic in the context of set theory and such. Similarly, I am able to understand what the word “truth” means of chairs in the context of observation, evidence, science.

However, you are now bringing up a separate “magisterium” or domain of knowledge – morality – which you have fiated into existence in a very peculiar way. At first glance, it resembles a formal system like math in that you fiat several parts of it into existence, but it also resembles science because you’re trying to tie it to observation of our shared world via this purported hypothetical sense.

When I attack your reasoning as violating the is-ought gap and for violating your own arguments elsewhere, you retreat away from moral realism into this nebulous arena where morality might exist like this chair exists, but it’s utterly unobservable and has no impact on my life whatsoever. Again, in that sense, what is the difference between a dragon which is invisible, intangible, heatless, etc., and no dragon at all? That is why I call your position incoherent. I literally do not understand what you are talking about.

PS: Note that I do understand another category of facts. I call this category morality. It consists of statements like “One should X” and “One ought to Y”. Similar to math, it is an axiomatic framework. It rests on the axioms of humanism. Of course, for a full treatment of my views, that would take a while. The short version is that it’s very similar from what I can tell of Sam Harris’s formulation in The Moral Landscape and his related talks. It’s not so much commands and duties. It’s more things that I value, and things I want others to value, and some subset of those things I will use violence to force my wishes on others (ex: I’ll use violence to prevent murder).

As I said multiple times before. How do you [know] anything objectively exists? How do you know your computer objectively exists? Because you perceive it! The burden of proof is on the skeptic to prove that people’s perception is wrong and noone here has been able to bring any evidence people should not trust their perceptions.

1) You should really really define your terms, like what you mean by “objective” / “objectively”

2) As to perceiving the computer:

Human beings have PLENTY of experience with MISperception. Have you ever thought you saw something, but it turned out you were wrong? Either there was nothing there, or it was something different from what you first perceived? Human beings make mistakes in perception all the time. A lot of the time, such mistakes are not fatal, but sometimes those misperceptions are fatal. There is nothing 100% reliable about human, individual “perception.”

I conclude that the computer is physically real not merely because I “perceive” it, but because inter-subjectively, other people see, feel, hear, etc. it too.

“Perception” is not just one mechanism. We have 5 senses. When we think we perceive something, it might be possible to re-test the perception by cross-referencing different senses. you think you see something — you can look again, you can touch the thing to verify if it’s there, you can check to see if you can sense it in more than one way, or use more than one faculty.

We can also check our own perceptions individually, at least in some cases, by e.g., repeating the experiment to try to replicate results. If the result comes out the same multiple times, then we can have some confidence that our original questioned perception was correct.

We could still be wrong if we are depending solely on our own individual perceptions, but what enables us to have reasonable confidence that an object is physically real, for example, is cross-referencing to the other perceptions of other people. When everyone in the room agrees there is a computer on the desk, we get closer to saying that the computer is a physically real object; if you’re the only one who says there is a computer on the desk and no one else agrees, which is more likely? that your perception is wrong, or that everyone else is wrong?

A physical object like a computer does not “objectively exist” merely “because you perceive it!” — it requires much more than that. It requires intersubjective cross-perception to verify. Why? Because we all know already that perceptions are notoriously unreliable. You have the experience of unreliable perception yourself, and you know about it in others. It is utterly mystifying how you can say no one has brought any evidence that people cannot trust their perceptions.

You are still denying inter-subjectivity. We can use intersubjectivity so that we don’t have to rely solely on individual perception. It’s possible for a bunch of people all to have the same misperception, i.e., even inter-subjective perception might be wrong, but at least it’s a hedge against individual perception errors most of the time.

You also are using the analogy to a physical object (computer) to suggest that there is such a thing as “objective” morality. As to physical objects and perception, we know what the faculties and mechanisms of perception are: They are grounded in physical reality: sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing. They involve physical phenomena such as light waves, sound waves, interaction of molecules, nerve endings and biochemical processes, and so on. (I’m no scientist.)

What kind of a “thing” is a moral principle, and what mechanism or faculty are you using when you say you “perceive” it? seriously, PLEASE describe, in detail, what that mechanism or faculty is, and how you use it. If you have this knowledge, and can impart it to others, we need to know. How do you know or verify that your perception is right, when it differs from the perceptions of so many other people?

A moral value is not a physical reality in the same way that a computer is a physical reality. But if there were as much disagreement about “this computer exists” as there is about “X is a moral/immoral action/value/principle” then we would have far less confidence the “objective” (= actual, physical existence) of the computer. If a substantial number of people cannot detect the computer, or think that it’s something other than a computer, that argues against the actual existence of the computer, or should at least shake our confidence in our conclusion.

Don’t conflate non-criminal with legal, as I worry you might be doing here.

Are you making the assertion that you think you’re making, or are you ruling out only criminal prohibitions?

Sorry. You are correct. I was not being clear enough about criminal vs civil. Let me fix that.

I also happen to hold to the unpopular position that we should have a first amendment for civil suits too, assuming it’s not already covered. (I don’t know offhand. I’m pretty sure modern courts have probably decided it does not apply to civil suits, but… meh. I go with “I don’t know”.)

Mere outrage and mere offense should never be something that the police can arrest you for, and it should never be something that someone can file any sort of civil suit over. It should not be a crime, misdemeanor, etc. It should also never constitute damages in any civil court preceding.

That is the principle of free speech from the Enlightenment. “I might disagree with what you have to say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it” – paraphrase of Voltaire.

@EnlightenmentLiberal
Ack, even then, I am an idiot. I think now that you are talking about criminal vs misdemeanor penalties moreso than criminal court vs civil court issues. However, I still think I made my position clear. Sorry – I’m not a lawyer. I just pretend (not really) to have a tolerable self education on these issues on the internets.

I’m guessing that most people here agree with it – that even if we accept that the fetus is a person (and we don’t), abortion is every pregnant person’s absolute right, because autonomy is sacrosanct. People who are pregnant must be given the option to consent to their pregnancy, and their statement of “no” must be respected. Full stop.

Can autonomy ever be violated, you ask? Is consent ever not needed?

Only in extreme situations: if you are in an accident and lose consciousness, medical staff will attend to you, even though you are not capable of giving consent. That said, if someone presents themself to them as your next-of-kin (relative, spouse, etc), that person will be asked for consent. Once you regain consciousness, you will be asked to consent.

It is only in truly extreme situations, fraught with ethical peril, that something can be done over someone’s lack of consent. Such situations require proving that the person is in fact not capable of providing consent.

This is the cornerstone of medicine – informed consent.

Consent is rooted in autonomy.

Without autonomy, you could be required to donate organs and blood to those in need. You could be required to be a guinea pig for research.

This is a repugnant situation and should never be tolerated – but this also underlies the importance of never decentering autonomy.

Which is why women – all people – have the absolute right to dictate what does, and does not, happen to their persons.

There are no cogent non-leading questions on autonomy. Either the woman is fully human with full human rights including bodily autonomy, or she doesn’t. If she doesn’t, but burden of evidence is upon you to show otherwise, not ask fuckwitted irrelevant idiotic questions trying to challenge that concept.
Where is fuck is your evidence?????

I think we can trust this “moral sense” in the same way we trust our sense experience or our intuitions regarding the existence of physical reality and the existence of other minds.

How then to navigate someone telling me that they sense auras? Or have memories from a past life? Consistent independent observations strengthen evidence, conflicting observations weaken. I don’t trust ‘moral sense’ precisely because people who I know directly opine differently about what is correct and what ought to be avoided. It is outside of any reasonable existence to suggest that falling from a cliff is not to be avoided or that jumping in front of a car won’t have dire consequences. Reality doesn’t respond with a philosophical diatribe, it just hurts when it is ignored.

Let me be clear , I’m speaking to more of an ontological account of morality wrt God as opposed to an epistemological account.

Translation: “I’m more interested in playing word games than actually proving that I have a relevant point”

I asked a question at 514.you mind answering it?

How about, for a change of pace, you actually answer our questions? Or respond to our criticisms? Or do anything other than wank in the corner and pretend that WE are the ones that are failing to engage YOU?

I’m going to take all of the (many) important physiological differences between fetii and babies and set them aside.

Here’s the real difference, from a body-autonomy perspective.

If a baby’s caregivers are suddenly incapable or unwilling to provide care (for whatever reason), someone else can step in and provide that care. Any halfway competent person can prepare formula, put it in a bottle, and hold it to a baby’s mouth. Any halfway competent person can change a diaper.

Anyone with the intelligence of a seven-year-old and some degree of strength and motor control can provide basic care to an infant (I say basic – raising a child and being the primary caregiver is a serious undertaking that is serious work).

By contrast, if a pregnant person dies or is otherwise rendered incapable of gestating, there is – unless the fetus is sufficiently developed to immediately transition to being a baby – literally no one that can step in and take over the task of gestation.

For that reason, babies and fetii are not analogous.

A better analogy for a fetus is a person on life support.

That life support turns off, they die.

That life support malfunctions, they die.

That life support is removed, they die.

However – if the person is removed from life support when the can survive without it – even if said survival requires a skilled nurse to come in and change their linens and start IVs – then they do not die.

Because morality is a natural physical phenomenon, which refutes your own argument that objective morality can’t be natural?

No? Why not?

I can think of a world where objective reality does not exist and it is all an illusion of consciousness. This world would look the same as ours to the conscious observer.

What the fuck? So people don’t feel anything in this hypothetical world, but they have consciousness that provides them these elaborate illusions of feeling stuff? How is that supposed to work? If you’re conscious of feeling something, you’re feeling it. Your mind can’t “trick” you into thinking you’re feeling it when you actually aren’t, because the trick (if you feel like calling it that) always works. Maybe you think people’s pleasure and suffering doesn’t matter, because GAWD is so much bigger and has the bigger penis — but why think morality is about that?

And why would the conceivability of this, if it is indeed conceivable (and you aren’t suffering from some illusion, say), have anything to do with whether or not the argument you’re responding to is any good? You imagining something tells us not a fucking thing about the actual world. I can conceive of purple unicorns, and that doesn’t make arguments for or against purple unicorns more or less convincing.

I can conceive of a version of you that is a philosophical zombie, that looks and behaves teh same but has no conscious experience.

Enlightenment Liberal is plainly wrong, but they don’t need to conflate conceiving of something (or thinking that you’re conceiving something, when you actually aren’t) with having a perception of something. You have not, in fact, perceived any P-zombies.

I think we can trust this “moral sense” in the same way we trust our sense experience or our intuitions regarding the existence of physical reality and the existence of other minds.

You don’t need to intuit that stuff exists. It just does, so do you, and you experience that stuff. Sometimes (in Russia) the stuff experiences you.

However, you’re playing right into his hands. Why should I base my actions on this purported sense? Kroos saying that “I shouldn’t kill a baby if it feels icky, to me, personally,” makes as much sense as saying “I shouldn’t let gays get married if it feels icky, to me, personally” or “If I see it raining tomorrow, I should kill my neighbor”. Violations of the is-ought gap are non-sequiturs. Don’t call it a “morality sense” except in scare quotes. Going from “there’s this sense which gives me icky feels sometimes” to “morality sense” is his entire job. Using the phrase “morality sense” is playing right into his begging the question.

There’s one thing for psychics or mediums to say that they sense auras. We can approach that scientifically, see if they related to the rest of the conventional material shared reality, and start doing tests. At no point would it make sense to out-of-the-blue claim that “He has a red aura, so we should kill him”, which is exactly what a “morality sense” would require.

About what? About the coherent-ness of philosophical zombies? I’m at least in good company then with the apparently plainly-wrong Daniel Dennett (insofaras I understand his position from several talks). I’m just noting that it’s not quite as uncontroversial and one-sided as you make it out to be.

Kroos saying that “I shouldn’t kill a baby if it feels icky, to me, personally,” makes as much sense as saying “I shouldn’t let gays get married if it feels icky, to me, personally” or “If I see it raining tomorrow, I should kill my neighbor”. Violations of the is-ought gap are non-sequiturs. Don’t call it a “morality sense” except in scare quotes. Going from “there’s this sense which gives me icky feels sometimes” to “morality sense” is his entire job. Using the phrase “morality sense” is playing right into his begging the question.

Reminds me of the studies about liberal vs. conservative morality. While liberal morality involves focusing on harm and justice, conservative morality takes that and also adds in the “moralities” of “disgust” and “purity” and “obedience”. Which is why the morality debate is such a fucking mess: because people have ridiculous fucking baggage that they add onto the concepts of “morals” and have ridiculous fucking standards for “morality”. Some people use reason, most just say “EWWWW” and try to coerce people into obeying with their gut-level revulsions by conflating their prejudices with “morality”.

‘Course, my analogy to a person on life support breaks down once you consider that life-support systems contain redundancies and backups, and are made of interchangeable parts that can be swapped out, meaning that if a system goes down it can – provided the staff works quickly enough – be replaced with a new one.

Which is the point I am aiming at. My sense differs dramatically from that of others who I know. Given that human senses are not, at best, reliable, and are, arguably, unreliable, using them to determine what is correct and what is not seems fraught with peril. A better option beckons.

The burden of proof is on the skeptic to prove that people’s perception is wrong and noone here has been able to bring any evidence people should not trust their perceptions.

Prima facie evidence KC is a liar and bullshitter? His perception is that he isn’t a proven evidenceless air and bullshitter on every thread he has posted on a Pharyngula. The facts are in, and nothing KC says should be taken as anything other than drivel.

I don’t see how that constitutes a failure of the method, though. It seems to me about as relevant as criticizing physics for not telling us which of the Power Rangers is the coolest.

If we’re talking American Power Rangers the answer is Carter Grayson/Lightspeed Red followed by Jen Scotts/Time Force Pink. If we’re talking the original Super Sentai it’s Satoru Akashi/BoukenRed with Captain Marvelous/GokaiRed as a close second.

Incidentally this conclusion is at least as evidentially grounded as anything Croos has ever said.

. Reminds me of my friend who loaned me a Lee Strobel book in an effort to convince me of creationism.

Reminds me of the people who swear by C.S. Lewis. I thought for the longest time that he had written a brilliant magnum opus, proving Christianity with the most robust, sophisticated, and undeniable arguments, the way that Good Christians would mention his apologetics so approvingly, and so frequently, almost salivating. And then…I go and read “Mere Christianity”. Basically Kroos’s argument here. But just “morality” and nothing else. And, somehow, amazingly, with even LESS philosophical know-how than our resident Craighead.

And of course, via Pharyngula, I’ve come to learn about sooooo many more over-rated apologists.

By fucking God, it is easy to make money making facile arguments in support of a fragile and ill-supported popular wisdom. If I didn’t have a sense of decency and dignity, I would turn into one of these hacks and ride the fucking gravy train to minor fame and fortune, via the grand and mysterious power of wingnut welfare.

Don’t they all? I will try to restrain myself from engaging if you think it is best. It probably is, because even if it doesn’t stop him, at it least saves wasted effort. Effort that I could be wasting on the far more entertaining troll thumping a Bible with a heart-shaped picture of Billy Craig on the cover.

Don’t call it a “morality sense” except in scare quotes. Going from “there’s this sense which gives me icky feels sometimes” to “morality sense” is his entire job. Using the phrase “morality sense” is playing right into his begging the question.

Precisely. First, he must demonstrate that this “sense” is actually perceiving anything external. Then he must demonstrate that these perceptions carry some kind of prescriptive force. Only then can it be said to be a “moral sense”.

Instead, Kroos prefers to jump right along to the point where he’s obviously right and the burden of proof has switched to everyone else. I get that it’s certainly a lot easier to argue that way, but it’s neither honest nor convincing.

I seem to recall this objection being raised before and Kroos utterly ignoring it. Maybe we’ll have more luck this time.

Did you miss our usual spamming sockpuppet? Don’t worry, he didn’t forget us — he has a whole bunch of comments caught in the spam trap. His pseudonym this time was 4 different spelling variants of “clockwork orange”.

There are some good posts on that link. “if you can’t understand why someone would hold a position, you don’t understand that position. ”
I don’t like Sam Harris , but this is so true.

@antepropo

By fucking God, it is easy to make money making facile arguments in support of a fragile and ill-supported popular wisdom. If I didn’t have a sense of decency and dignity, I would turn into one of these hacks and ride the fucking gravy train to minor fame and fortune, via the grand and mysterious power of wingnut welfare.

@Alexandra
No fair ! I answered your question and you didn’t answer mine!

I think its unique from the other cases you cited with organ donation as such. I did not mean it was uncommon overall.
Maybe a better analogy would be if I signed up for this activity and ended up donating my kidney for someone else to use for 9 months at the end. A little while in I decided I wanted my kidney back and I compelled the recipient to engage in a surgical procedure that killed the kidney recipient so I could take back the kidney for my usage. You probably would say this isn’t a good analogy , and I would say organ donation wasn’t a good analogy.

You probably would say this isn’t a good analogy , and I would say organ donation wasn’t a good analogy.

No Kroos, your analogy is bad, but the organ donation is on the point. You acknowledge you are wrong. Until you can do that, you are preaching.

Too many religious folks come here and think we well swallow their testament. We laugh at testament, and we require third party evidence. So, quit giving testament, and actually discuss facts, not your viewpoint of your theology covering those facts.

This thread is just an illusion of your perception. You guys should stop commenting here.

For those that agree we can in general trust our perception unless there is specific evidence tat shows it is unreliable we can continue a reasonable discussion. Of course the person above said he can talk to other people to confirm the existence of the chair. I can talk to other people and they will largely agree killing babies for fun is wrong .

Kroos Control argues that it’s not fair to be dubious of the extrapolation and induction that because everything we see has a cause, thus everything we see has a cause. My counter is: Why aren’t you more dubious about your a-temporal cause? All the causes we’ve ever see are inside of time and temporally precede the thing they cause.

This isn’t necessarily true. There are examples of simultaneous causation.

Both choices are seemingly silly and unprecedented: things and causes outside of time, or something without a cause. At least, they’re both equally preposterous to me. Why do you think one is less preposterous?

Well the one that denies the causal principle is probably metaphysically impossible.
If there is nothing that has the potential to bring the universe into being , how could it come into being? The idea that a timelessly existing God willed the universe into being might seem unusual , but it at least is possible.
I made an argument from the PSR that the causal principle was true as well.

Even then, you’re ignoring a couple of the branches above, such as a bound on time in the past, but no first time. It’s mathematically describable, consistent, etc. Ex: t∈{x|x∈R∧x>0}
I also honestly see nothing wrong with time being unbounded in the past, at least a priori, and the physics seems currently undecided. Worse, it may wrong to model time classically as I do here.

Even if you arbitrarily decided to call the time when the universe began to exist t=2 or whatever , there still is a first moment of existence of teh universe.
Craig has a few arguments against an infinite series of past events and the impossibility of traversing an infinite series of events. Most modern cosmological models tend to agree that the universe is not past infinite.

For those that agree we can in general trust our perception unless there is specific evidence tat shows it is unreliable we can continue a reasonable discussion.

There will no no further discussion. You claim you perceive something that you can’t demonstrate is there. You are delusional, and we don’t care to listen to your ramblings of your delusions. Otherwise, show us your deity isn’t imaginary. Everybody has been waiting for that evidence, and your failure to provide it tells us everything about your lack of honesty and integrity.

What exactly do you think you’re perceiving? Do you know what that word means? Your quick leap to “conceiving” earlier leads me to suspect that you’re probably misusing the word. So instead of dealing with the strawman of your position which you unwittingly made for us, and the big fat red herring of discussing the reliability or unreliability of our sense perception, we should be talking about how conceiving something (even assuming you actually are doing that) is in no way useful to your argument. “I conceive it, so it exists” is just another application of the ontological argument, which can easily be shown to be invalid.

… Oh wait, most of that’s already been pointed out, and you’ve said nothing since. I guess I’ll just wait over here, until you explain to us which argument you’re making, the one with the false premise or the one with the invalid reasoning.

Oh, and KC, quit pretending you are controlling the discussion. That is a preaching technique and must be discarded here, as we laugh at it, you and do what we want to do. Just trying makes you sound stupid.

This isn’t necessarily true. There are examples of simultaneous causation.

There are no examples of disembodied minds, or disembodied minds causing things, or disembodied minds causing things atemporally.

Well the one that denies the causal principle is probably metaphysically impossible.

“Probably impossible” = you going with your gut and sticking to your own view, without defending it in any way.

If there is nothing that has the potential to bring the universe into being , how could it come into being?

Who says it “came into being”? Why does “something” need to “cause” stuff to be, and what the hell would that even mean? If there were some state of total nonexistence, there are no rules anywhere in that saying that stuff can’t exist. But what’s the problem with existence just being the way things are, however that might be? We don’t need to confuse ourselves into thinking that some other thing (somehow not included in “existence”) must have done it with magic.

The idea that a timelessly existing God willed the universe into being might seem unusual , but it at least is possible.

So it isn’t contradictory to say that a thinking, willing agent thinks and acts timelessly? What is timeless thinking and acting like, and how exactly does that work? If you can’t answer that, then you have no grounds at all to claim it’s consistent. Think about this: when have you (or any other thinking, willing agent) ever acted upon nothingness to cause existence itself?

Even if you arbitrarily decided to call the time when the universe began to exist t=2 or whatever , there still is a first moment of existence of teh universe.

Not if the universe has always existed. This is one of your many assumptions, which isn’t supported by the facts as we know them.

Craig has a few arguments against an infinite series of past events and the impossibility of traversing an infinite series of events.

Expressing incredulity isn’t an argument. He simply hasn’t shown any inconsistency. His understanding of the relevant math and physics leaves something to be desired. You’ve been duped, or you’re fooling yourself into taking it seriously because it’s the conclusion you want to hear.

Most modern cosmological models tend to agree that the universe is not past infinite.

Give me a list me all of the modern cosmological models, then I can count them (as you claim to have to done here) to see whether or not this is true. Or maybe it’s just a load of bullshit you’ve made up. Either way, I’d like to know.

For those that agree we can in general trust our perception unless there is specific evidence tat shows it is unreliable we can continue a reasonable discussion.

Why don’t you first start by demonstrating that your moral intuitions can in any reasonable way be described as “perceptions”. E.g. do you consider your dreams to also be perceptions and therefore objectively real? If not, why not?

It appears to me that for example killing babies for fun is objectively wrong.

It appears to me that you’re a fucking moron. Are you going to accept is as objectively true that you’re a moron? If not, why not?

@opposablethhumbs.
Its a really loaded question.
Its like asking
“When did you stop beating your wife?”
“Why do gay people want more rights than everyone else?”
Its really loaded such that I can’t really answer.

@Nerd of Redhead
Your arguments are inconsistent with your moral view. You said society makes up morals.
If society makes up moral rights, then they can take them away.
You should change to objective morals.

Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaidensays

For the record, asking KC to clarify and expound on their position (pregnancy is unique) is asking a loaded question that they are unwilling to answer. Which leads me to believe that KC finds abortion icky, so we should not have abortions because KC finds abortion icky.

Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaidensays

It appears to me[, Kroos,] that you’re a fucking moron. Are you[, Kroos,] going to accept it as objectively true that you’re a moron? If not, why not? (typo correction is –>it mine, -cd)

I perceive moronity in Kroos with my moron-sense. But more than that, I have a meta-moronity sense that perceives whether any given moronity is objective. I can hereby conclusively say that Kroos is objectively moronic

…unless Kroos, using detailed empirical and verifiable explanations, can first prove how my meta-moronity sense works and then show how it has gone wrong in this case so I have a reason to doubt it.

Apparently the only tricks left in Kroos’s book are dodge, dip, duck, dive, and dodge. Pitiful. A broken record, a pompous illogical windbag who thinks they are a master of logic. A fauxlospher whose best argument so far, after 12 STRAIGHT DAYS of arguing, is “NO U!”.

What objective morals? If it all comes to “because I said so”, or “my imaginary deity said so”, you are nothing but a delusional fool trying to pretend authority where none exist.
Where the fuck is your solid and conclusive physical evidence for your imaginary deity. Which is why you are nothing but a delusional fool, whose mewlings cannot separate cogent secular arguments from delusional theological arguments.

Its a really loaded question.
Its like asking
“When did you stop beating your wife?”
“Why do gay people want more rights than everyone else?”
Its really loaded such that I can’t really answer.

No, it really isn’t. 1) Because I’m not pretending that you have said something you haven’t (as in the “beating your wife” structure) – you have indeed argued that a foetus has the right to make use of someone else’s body; a right that no born person has. 2) Your “gay people want more rights” example is nonsense, of course, as gay people merely want the same rights as everyone else. And if you mean this line as another example of the “beating your wife” type, then 1) applies here too.

It’s not a loaded question – it’s just one that you refuse to answer.
Why should a foetus have the right to make use of someone’s body? This is a right that no born person has, so why should a foetus have more rights than any born person?

You know, the things which are actually harmful or beneficial to actual people in the real world.

Do any of you have a difficult time with this concept any other time, or is it only when folks like our resident theist moron start with this god-says-so horseshit? Maybe you should make that clear. Then they won’t have that avenue to attack; and it can die a quick death, like it’s been wanting to do for fucking centuries.

You know what’s far ickier than abortion, KC? Pregnancy and childbirth. You know what’s far more painful than an abortion, KC? Pregnancy and childbirth. You know what’s far more dangerous than abortion, KC? Pregnancy and childbirth.

What is so unique about a fetus that anyone should have to risk their health for it, when we don’t demand that they risk their health for anyone else?

You know, the things which are actually harmful or beneficial to actual people in the real world.

Yes, and science has ways of looking at such things and saying with these morals, these are the consequences that result. Change them to this second set, and the consequences change to this. So educated discussion can lead to very workable morals.

Of course, KC is trying to take objective morals and pretend he receives them from his imaginary deity, which are really absolute morals, and they say what KC thinks are morals. His objective morals are nothing but a dog whistle for absolute morals, which are a dog whistle for his personal prejudices pretending to be objective morals.

This thread is just an illusion of your perception. You guys should stop commenting here.

For those that agree we can in general trust our perception unless there is specific evidence tat shows it is unreliable we can continue a reasonable discussion.

No one is saying the nature of reality can’t be investigated through our senses.

What we are saying is that we don’t trust our senses.

Do you know what trust is? What faith is? These are stances one adopts **in the absence of evidence**. We don’t trust our senses, we **test** our senses. We test them repeatedly as babies and toddlers: falling down if we don’t respond appropriately to our senses of balance and sight, burning ourselves if we don’t trust our temperature senses, getting a time out if we ignore our senses of hearing. We test them more as children and rely on them – to the extent that they’ve proven reliable – as adults. If we wear corrective lenses, we don’t trust that a grey smudge can tell us that one of our children has actually become the 9th Clayface. We put on our glasses and look at our child again and find, still well-defined, a nose and zygomatic arches and a maxillary and a mandible, with musculature and dermis overlaying the bones and intact.

NO ONE TRUSTS THEIR SENSES. EVERYONE TESTS THEIR SENSES AND USES DATA TO ESTABLISH RELATIVE RELIABILITY.

Of course the person above said he can talk to other people to confirm the existence of the chair. I can talk to other people and they will largely agree killing babies for fun is wrong .

Either you are so stupid you don’t know that agreeing killing babies for fun is wrong is different than agreeing morality is objective, or you do know this and are a liar.

In any case, if you actually believed that this was a good argument, you would assert that morality is objective, listen to other people agree or disagree, and – if people disagreed – conclude that your perception of objectivity is unreliable.

But you don’t, even though people are disagreeing with you all over the place.

So clearly, you don’t believe in your own argument. Clearly, you have tested your assertion in exactly the way described and found widespread disagreement. Clearly, the results do not support the idea that your “Super Meta-Morality Sense” is as reliable as Spidey-Sense.

But do you persist in asserting that your SMMS is reliable? Claro que si.

So what does that make your statements in this thread? Conscious lies.

Maybe a better analogy would be if I signed up for this activity and ended up donating my kidney for someone else to use for 9 months at the end. A little while in I decided I wanted my kidney back and I compelled the recipient to engage in a surgical procedure that killed the kidney recipient so I could take back the kidney for my usage. You probably would say this isn’t a good analogy , and I would say organ donation wasn’t a good analogy.

The difference being that I can tell you why it’s not a good analogy: Because it involves the two people being separate and the kidney being entirely transferred from one person to the other. This brings up a problem, since the return procedure would include a violation of the bodily autonomy of the temporary recipient.

Now, if instead we say that the donor consents to, for a nine month period, come to the hospital and have the recipient’s blood filtered through the donor’s system, effectively making use of the donor’s kidneys without removing them, then we’ve got something much more analogous to a pregnancy.

However, that also makes the choice obvious; the donor has the right to, at any time, for any reason, discontinue their cooperation. No matter the situation, the donor cannot be compelled to undergo the treatment. This follows naturally form the very same principles we use in any other case involving medical rights and consent.

Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaidensays

I shoot my twin, b/c reasons. Significantly, however, I would like my twin to live. Maybe I am playing trickshot recklessly, or maybe I shoot at my twin while my twin wears a bullet proof vest, but unbeknownst to me the BPV has some holes in it, whatever. Doesn’t matter now.

I use a low-caliber gun with a bullet designed to blah, blah, blah, it completely tears up the liver but [significantly] damages nothing else, b/c reasons.

Docs confirm I’m the only HLA match and that a new technique will allow them to grow a functional liver from a small sample. They can easily use 2 small samples and grow two genetically identical livers.

They suggest that I donate 1/2 of my liver to my twin. Their are risks, they say, but the risks are not too great. The risks do, however, increase over time (incomplete liver function or whatever). Of course, in 9 months there will be a full grown liver to reimplant and there will be an additional risky procedure – but not too risky, with modern practices, only a few in a thousand die – that will return me to good as new.

Can I be compelled to donate 1/2 of my liver to my twin?

Why or why not?

Again, the question isn’t “is it moral of me to refuse?” The question is, “Is it moral of the government to force me to participate if I decline?”

Kroos would like to pretend that only the first question exists, but when talking about rights, the right exists or fails based on the second question, not the first.

And you lost the anti-choicers right there. They are going to pre-occuppied with that part and focus on that and morality of that, and thus the morals of the healthy twin, and are not going to get the point of the analogy at all as a result.

This thread is just an illusion of your perception. You guys should stop commenting here.

Our eyesight is known to usually be accurate. This has been tested, repeatedly, and for the most part our eyes are consistent with one another. It has been established that our eyes can generally be trusted. The same cannot be said of “moral perception.”

But you wanna know what I find really funny? Despite your dismissal of empiricism, “trusting your moral perceptions” is a completely empirical argument; it relies entirely on observation and experience.

What if I have bad health after I donate the kidney and want it back?

The kidney isn’t yours any more; a woman’ organs remain her organs during pregnancy.

To use the analogy above with the kidney. What if I have bad health after I donate the kidney and want it back?

Is the kidney still in your body when you ask for it back?

So long as it is INSIDE your body you can back out of any promise to donate, no matter what. Once it is OUTSIDE your body, and inside the body of the recipient, then it isn’t about your bodily autonomy anymore. It is about the recipient’s. And it also isn’t your kidney anymore. It is his.

This thread is just an illusion of your perception. You guys should stop commenting here.

Is thread, and everything on the internet, and everything shown on a computer screen, IS an illusion of our perceptions, you sorry twit. It’s objective reality is patterns of groups of electrons moving to and fro. The words we see are all an illusion of our human perception. The words themselves are ALSO illusions of human perception. Patterns of sounds or symbols (invented by humans!) that represent sounds that were assigned arbitrary meanings by the subjective whims of generations of humans.

And we need not stop commenting here because we are humans are humans are creatures of subjective reality. That is our species’ survival trick. We live in imaginary worlds of our collective creation, and through the sweat of our brows and cleverness of our fingers, we make those imaginary worlds temporarily real.

I also, of course, am a Contributing Member of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy. I fund a fleet of Black Helicopters and have been instrumental in the operation of Secret Atheist Reprogramming Centres Aimed Solely at Materialism.

yep. now KC will try to equivocate all kinds of things as actually being “consent”.

actually it’s worse than that, because pregnancy is more analogous to the blood supply example someone wrote out. the body organs never have a permanent transfer, only the nutrients from blood that have already been absorbed are transferred very permanently at all. but a supply would only be a stream of small donations, and a donation that has not been transferred brings us back to the ability for us to back out of any other donation from our body before it has occurred.

But you wanna know what I find really funny? Despite your dismissal of empiricism, “trusting your moral perceptions” is a completely empirical argument; it relies entirely on observation and experience.

i think the only reason i didn’t notice this sooner is that the nonsense being spewed is too incoherent and my brain gives up trying to sort through the various fragments.

And you lost the anti-choicers right there. They are going to pre-occuppied with that part and focus on that and morality of that, and thus the morals of the healthy twin, and are not going to get the point of the analogy at all as a result.

Which is a strength from my perspective. Although **I** certainly don’t think that sex is a moral wrong, **they** do. Grilled Cheezus, how many times have we seen “slutty” women condemned only to have the theocratic jerk faces defend themselves with, “But I’m even handed – I also condemn rapists and murderers”? I want to walk through the hang ups of the irrelevant questions and show why they are irrelevant.

2 This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. 3 Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy[a] all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’”

God then proceeds to whine at Samuel because Saul didn’t kill the sheep or the kind. Or rather, didn’t kill the sheep properly, because they offered them as burnt offerings instead of just obediently slaughtering them immediately. God is impatient.

And then they continue talk about how this is sin, and rebellion, and how Israel is now torn asunder. All because the guy who killed infants, women, and children didn’t kill the king and the sheep fast enough. This is one ridiculously melodramatic, irrational story, this Bibble.

Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaidensays

This thread is just an illusion of your perception. You guys should stop commenting here.

The second sentence doesn’t follow from the first. My entire conscious existence is an illusion created by interplay between my sensory inputs and the connections already made in my brain. Now, whether I am alone in this, or there are real other people who I communicate with in this illusion doesn’t change that I can interact with those people, be they real or imagined. I do this through manipulating my perceived body in ways which generate feedback into the illusion I experience. This illusion is consistent with existing as part of a social environment and provides me rich reason to continue commenting here.

I reject the notion that doubt ought to make me stop. Instead, doubt would make me pay more attention, trying to find inconsistencies and perhaps to discern a deeper pattern.

Kroos Control has made cogent and devastating arguments against their ability to make cogent and devastating arguments. They’ve presented a very sound, evidentiary, and coherent case that they are full of sound and fury but symbolize nothing. I can say that over the course of 12 days Kroos has laid out their many logical pitfalls and shortcomings in exhaustive detail and provided a great wealth of precedent to suggest they are very unlikely to make any other coherent arguments.

Of course Kroos Control obviously did not set out to make such a great argument about their inability to argue, so I’m not sure it’s what you wanted when you called a coherent argument, Tony.

For those that agree we can in general trust our perception unless there is specific evidence tat shows it is unreliable we can continue a reasonable discussion

For moral judgments we already have mountains of evidence that individual perceptions should not be trusted. We have nearly unending lists of examples of real people who committed awful moral transgressions all the while convinced they were doing the right thing. No ethical or decent human should ever arrogantly presume that he or she is somehow immune to making the same mistakes with his or her own moral “perceptions”.

For other things we already have extreme and specific evidence that beyond the limited range of human sizes, distances and timescales, our perceptions are completely unreliable. That chair you perceive as solid? It is actually 99.99999% empty space. You think you cannot pass your hand through it because the solid material is physically blocking your way? That too is an illusion of your perception, since it is actually an electromagnetic force field that is repelling the atoms in your body from the atoms in that chair. You think that glass screen on your computer or your window is a solid, immobile thing? It’s not. It is a liquid, and it is in the process of flowing slowly to the ground.

Well Tony, I am masochistic enough to skim through the Knight thread and the Thunderdome to find the only things resembling good points that Kroos has! Not really cogent arguments as much as the only things that Kroos has said that make even the tiniest lick of sense.

1. Kroos is right that there are limits to empiricism. “I could show you why asking for physical evidence for every proposition is untenable and ultimately self refuting, nerd, but I doubt you’d change your mind.” Caveat: Kroos then immediately uses that claim that empiricism fails. So….maybe a bad example…
2. Kroos knows that Kent Hovind is an idiot and isn’t a fan of Sye Ten.
3. Kroos is right that Hitchens was a blustery, warmongering Islamophobe.
4. Kroos said “I think in discussion , people try to argue based on shared ethical beliefs.”
5.”I think there cultural , sociological and situational difficulties with comparing crime rates in say America and Sweden and attributing them to religiousity rather than other factors.”
6. ” under 1)X initial condition- Y is 100% likely to happen
and under 2) X initial conditon – Y is 20% likely to happen.

In both cases , X causes Y ,” is close to correct….
7. Agrees that QED is the best acronym ever.
8. “Any metaethical theory is going to have some kind of explanatory stopping point. ”
9.And of course, tons of good yet ridiculously ironic arguments, like “you’re simply making a number of unsupported assertions. If you can’t support them , please stop using them and argue about something else.”

I can’t even begin to list all of the comparable things Kroos has gotten wrong. It would be at least a ten-screener. And that is literally all I could find after combing through our roughly 1000 comment, two-thread “conversation”. Are you depressed yet?

Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaidensays

I want to walk through the hang ups of the irrelevant questions and show why they are irrelevant.

Noble, but good luck doing it with an evasive little shit like Kroos!

Yeah, I know it’s not really possible. I guess I had it in my head that people would take that as read, especially since I was trying to get all the dog whistles in, like the “holes in the bullet proof vest”.

But since all that came later it probably would have been a good idea to put a sarcasm tag on:

Fuckitall, everybody.

It’s easier than that.

Wasn’t really meant as a statement of arrogance. Was really meant of a statement about how since we’re able to enjoy any sweet, sweet success no matter how hard we try, we might as well pull a Dubya and make the pie higher.

Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaidensays

I disagree with you, anteprepro, that this is a good, cogent argument on Kroos behalf (if this faithfully represents the argument made).

Initial condition: Human beings exist
100% of the time, NYC has 100+ murders each year.

I could also easily go through the data for past years and find some number of murders X that NYC reaches about every 5th year. In that case:
Initial condition: Human beings exist
20% of the time, NYC has [specified number+] murders each year.

There’s no doubt that human existence is an “initial condition” – it’s certainly relevant to whether or not murders happen that potential murder victims exist. It’s not like the existence of a galaxy 7Giga-ly away which, while existing before NYC and throughout the entire existence of NYC couldn’t plausibly be taken as an “initial condition” in the sense meant.

Nonetheless, Kroos is wrong in saying that human existence **causes** NYC murders to exceed a specific number in a specific year. Hell, there’s no reason based on human existence that we would start our years on Jan 1, and changing that cutoff would inevitably change the measurements assigning some murders to different years – possibly even causing or preventing murders if some murderers are motivated by job losses or other such things that sometimes are timed to the calendar for tax or other reasons.

Just b/c something qualifies as an initial condition doesn’t mean it has **any chance** of being a “cause” in any relevant sense.

@Alexandra
You probably don’t have a lot of interest in interpreting the bible. But Middle eastern cultures are known for for using graphic metaphors and language to express anger . A Syrian named Rihbany (in the book The Syrian Christ , which is basically about the cultural mores of Syria) mentioned similar expressions and curses in modern Syria like “May your children be orphaned and your wife widowed”,”May God burn the bones of your fathers” . They”re not meant literally . That passage you cited is metaphorical.

@Tony!
What I wanted was to give something people had clear moral intuitions about. I’m sure if I did a survey asking “Do you perceive that killing babies for fun is immoral” almost everyone would say yes.
I wanted to start with a moral belief we all share. You’re saying no-one would consider actually doing it. Of course! Its because we all strongly see that it is wrong. Its as plain as day that its wrong to kill babies for fun.

It’s hard for me to imagine someone finding it fun to kill babies, although I know that humans have done so for a variety of reasons that I would also have difficulty imagining. Were they wrong? Or am I? If it’s them, why didn’t they recoil from doing so the same way I would? Could it be that my sense of baby protection has been fostered by culture and could, under different circumstances, not exist?

Hint fuckwit, a baby is born. A fetus is not. Saying or implying a fetus is a baby is a mother fucking lie, from someone knowingly lying and bullshitting for emotional effect. Like you. You should know better, as such lies are easily exposed, making you look stupid, and makes everything you say subject to greater skeptical scrutiny.

Why is it wrong? What do you mean by “perceive”? What faculty or mechanism of perception are you using? “Almost everyone would say yes,” indicates that a majority of the particular society you are asking agrees with a principle; agreement is not what makes something “objective” in the absolutist, outsider sense that you use it. Instead, you are relying on intersubjective consensus, the very thing you condemn everyone else for consulting.

More societies should decide that it is immoral to beat family members for disobeying the head of household.
More societies should decide its immoral to own other people.
More societies should decide its immoral to use violence to solve disagreements.

However, all these things have long histories and continue to happen today. So obviously it’s not as simple as perceiving an objective moral law and everyone agrees to act on it. You’re “killing babies for fun” is completely off topic. People don’t use morality & ethics to decide what is fun–they use it to decide what to do in difficult situations. Most frequently when value systems provide divergent answers.

I’ve said before I use empirical evidence all the time and it is compatible with my worldview.
However appealing to this belief isn’t really empiricism. Its a spontaneous belief formed from our perceptions, just as peceiving this chair causes me to believe the chair objectively exists.
Some people may deny that the chair objectively exists.
You can say that I might be hallucinating , or all of sensory experience is an illusion (which some schools of mysticism teach) , but clearly teh default position is taht it objectively exists unless there is good evidence to teh contrary.

Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaidensays

You probably don’t have a lot of interest in interpreting the bible. But Middle eastern *all* cultures are known for for using graphic mythic metaphors and language imaginary heroes or deities to express anger all kinds of things, including the hope for salvation and a promise of more happy comfort than is achievable in a crappy, subsistence-agriculture economy.

But if you did have any interest in interpreting the bible, this tendency of human cultures would seem to be quite relevant.

However appealing to this belief isn’t really empiricism. Its a spontaneous belief formed from our perceptions, just as peceiving this chair causes me to believe the chair objectively exists.

Belief based on observation and experience = empiricism

You can say that I might be hallucinating , or all of sensory experience is an illusion (which some schools of mysticism teach) , but clearly teh default position is taht it objectively exists unless there is good evidence to teh contrary.

Heh.

“Our eyesight is known to usually be accurate. This has been tested, repeatedly, and for the most part our eyes are consistent with one another. It has been established that our eyes can generally be trusted. The same cannot be said of ‘moral perception.’“

Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaidensays

What I wanted was to give something people had clear moral intuitions about.

No, what you wanted to do was give something people had clear moral **perceptions** about, because skeptics would have the burden of proof to show a cause for doubting your perception, but you have the burden of proof for showing the accuracy of your intuition.

Do you really not see any difference between perception and intuition?

I’ve said before I use empirical evidence all the time and it is compatible with my worldview.

If your “empirical evidence” also means what you intuit about your fictitious objective morals, you are nothing but a delusional liar and bullshitter. Your use of evidence is non-existent, and you ignore that which refutes your sorry arguments.

@Alexandra
I don’t think fetuses/babies have any extra rights. I think they have the rights to be protected from abuse and cared for by their parents and protected from harmful substances and poisoning/mutilation just like other children.

Just so no-one gets confused.
The issue of whether its objectively immoral to kill babies for fun and whether its OK to have abortions are completely separate issues we’re arguing. The debate about whether its wrong to kill babies for fun spilled over from the other thread and the abortion one started in this threas.

What I wanted was to give something people had clear moral intuitions about.

Liar. You said “perception” and you continued to say “perception” over many many posts. You truly are pathetic. Did you really think we would not be able to look back at those old posts and expose you once again for the liar that you are?

KCL
I didn’t accuse you of cherry-picking*, nor was that my point. My point is that every sect (and, hell, every reader) interprets the Bible as they see fit. Your interpretation isn’t the only interpretation.

But that’s beside the point. Why won’t you answer my question? Why are fetuses so special that we should grant them more rights than we grant to every born person?

Screw you Amphiox!!
Ever heard of a little thing called interpretive charity!!
I said my personal view tended toward intuitionism , but I was being vague with ‘perception’ to not exclude anyone else who had a different view of how we apprehend moral values and duties. My point was that we do apprehend/perceive these moral truths like “killing babies for fun is wrong” , however we come to them.
The lack of interpretive charity and reasoning you display is shocking.

“And thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters.” — Deuteronomy 28:53

“And toward her young one that cometh out from between her feet, and toward her children which she shall bear: for she shall eat them.” — Deuteronomy 28:57

“And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend.” — Jeremiah 19:9

“Therefore the fathers shall eat the sons in the midst of thee, and the sons shall eat their fathers.” — Ezekiel 5:10

“This woman said unto me, Give thy son, that we may eat him to day, and we will eat my son to morrow. So we boiled my son, and did eat him: and I said unto her on the next day, Give thy son, that we may eat him.” 2 Kings 6:28-29

“The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children: they were their meat.” — Lamentations 4:10

Not the same thing, you know. You just can’t resist trying to lump them into a single category, though, can you, eh, you rascal you!

I don’t think fetuses/babies have any extra rights.

(emphasis added)
Fine. So foetuses don’t have any rights that, say, a three-year-old doesn’t have.
You do know a three-year-old doesn’t have the legal right to his father’s blood, kidney, liver or bone-marrow against his father’s will – don’t you?

Which apparently consists on handwaving any uncomfortable passages as “metaphorical”. What is the massacre of the Amalekites (and the subsequent punishment visited upon the Israelites for not massacring them thoroughly enough) a metaphor FOR, Kroos?

I don’t think fetuses/babies have any extra rights. I think they have the rights to be protected from abuse and cared for by their parents and protected from harmful substances and poisoning/mutilation just like other children.

Are you arguing that if my daughter needed bone marrow, I should be compelled to donate to her? (We are close relatives and of the same blood type, so for the sake of argument let’s assume that we’re a “match”.) If not, why?

Also: Since you’re against “poisoning” a fetus, what should happen to a woman who smokes during pregnancy?

Screw you Amphiox!![1]
Ever heard of a little thing called interpretive charity!![2]
I said my personal view tended toward intuitionism , but I was being vague with ‘perception’ to not exclude anyone else who had a different view of how we apprehend moral values and duties.[3] My point was that we do apprehend/perceive these moral truths like “killing babies for fun is wrong” , however we come to them.
The lack of interpretive charity and reasoning you display is shocking.

1) I find the double exclamation funny.

2) Nope; there is the principle of charity, but that has to do with addressing the strongest interpretation of an opponent’s argument. It seems here that you want us to hold vague ideas about specific words; not quite the same thing.

3) Look at your own words:

“The burden of proof is on the skeptic to prove that people’s perception is wrong and noone here has been able to bring any evidence people should not trust their perceptions. ”

“This thread is just an illusion of your perception. You guys should stop commenting here. ”

“I’ve said before I use empirical evidence all the time and it is compatible with my worldview.
However appealing to this belief isn’t really empiricism. Its a spontaneous belief formed from our perceptions, just as peceiving this chair causes me to believe the chair objectively exists. ”

These “perceptions,” according to you, are analogous to eyesight and are compatible with empiricism. However, “intuition” is not remotely similar to eyesight, and is incompatible with empiricism. In fact, empiricism explicitly disavows any notion of “intuition”. Your position is a completely muddled mess.

I was being vague with ‘perception’ to not exclude anyone else who had a different view of how we apprehend moral values and duties.

1. “Perception”, implying an external target to be perceived that can used as a benchmark for comparison, is MORE EXCLUSIONARY than “intuition”, which is completely internal.

2. The moment the term “objective” is included, you automatically go to the MOST EXCLUSIONARY mode possible, since “objective” implies just one right and real way to the exclusion of all others which are wrong.

So here you, lying yet again. You didn’t want to exclude?! If you were honest about that you would never have used the term “objective” in the way you used it at all. Truly your weaselling around your fundamental dishonesty is pitiful.

interpretive charity

“charity” by definition is a gift, freely given. No one is entitled to charity, as you seem to think you are, least of all a proven dishonest dissembling liar with a track record of trying weasel around by changing the definitions of terms such as you are.

YOU DO NOT DESERVE SUCH CONSIDERATION, you pathetic lying piece of putrescence.

WORDS HAVE MEANINGS, you pitiful chunk of entitled obliviousness, MEANINGS MATTER. You do not get the right to invent them at your whim.

Also in regards to “fetus/babies”:
As Esteleth already pointed out, a fetus by definition is inside a pregnant woman. A baby, on the other hand, is wholly independent.

By stating that you’re not willing to give special rights to a “fetus/baby”, you’re either saying that parents should be compelled to use their bodies to keep their offspring alive (both before and after birth) OR you’re saying that you agree that parents can give up all parental responsibilities at any time.

Yea. I’m a big fan of Richard Carrier on epistemology for non-moral facts, and even moral facts to some degree, but I think I fundamentally disagree with his formalism. I’ve spent a little bit talking with him, and he was kind enough to talk back! As far as I can tell, Richard Carrier promotes a sort of non-naive egoism. In other words, he promotes that whatever is good for you, personally, is morally good. He also argues that there are no real situations where hurting your neighbor helps you. I happen to agree with Sam Harris most people do not appreciate that in more situations than you would think, helping your neighbor is the best way to help yourself. However, I think it patently obvious that there are situations where the best way to help yourself is to hurt your neighbor, which makes a fundamental difference between what I call morality and what Richard Carrier calls morality.

In other words, in essence, all Richard Carrier does is define morality to be the science of getting what you want. Richard Carrier and I are talking past each other. We simply have different understandings of what these words mean. I do not recognize his “morality” as morality. Consequently, I do not believe he has bridged the is-ought gap.

It reminds me of something Dan Dennett once said about consciousness. He said that many people believe that if we can explain it, then it’s not consciousness. “Consciousness is magic” they would say. In a metaphorical way, that applies to my position on morality. If you can reduce morality to mere material facts, then that’s not morality. “Morality is magic (very loosely).” Morality isn’t whether some aura turns red or some sensor turns blue. Morality is having the values and wherewithal to promote the good of yourself and others as the starting value. Now, determining which plans are effective at promoting the good of others and yourself very much does involve whether some aura turns red or some sensor turns blue, but that’s something fundamentally different than saying the red aura is morality (whatever the hell that might mean).

…

Quoting Kroos quoting me:

Both choices are seemingly silly and unprecedented: things and causes outside of time, or something without a cause. At least, they’re both equally preposterous to me. Why do you think one is less preposterous?

Well the one that denies the causal principle is probably metaphysically impossible.

If there is nothing that has the potential to bring the universe into being , how could it come into being? The idea that a timelessly existing God willed the universe into being might seem unusual , but it at least is possible.
I made an argument from the PSR that the causal principle was true as well.

To paraphrase the great Russell Glasser, when arguing with a presuppositionalist, the only good reply is “I do not accept that premise”. I do not accept that it is “metaphysically impossible”. I do not accept that things that come into being necessarily require an explanation / cause / whatever. Do you have evidence or argument for that proposition? I again state that it seems preposterous, but it seems equally preposterous to posit something outside of time. Have you ever seen something outside of time? I haven’t.

Even then, you’re ignoring a couple of the branches above, such as a bound on time in the past, but no first time. It’s mathematically describable, consistent, etc. Ex: t∈{x|x∈R∧x>0} […]

Even if you arbitrarily decided to call the time when the universe began to exist t=2 or whatever , there still is a first moment of existence of the universe.
Craig has a few arguments against an infinite series of past events and the impossibility of traversing an infinite series of events. Most modern cosmological models tend to agree that the universe is not past infinite.

You’re not very good with math, are you? Again consider this description of time: t∈{x|x∈R|x>0}. Equivalently: all t in set { x | x in Reals and x > 0 }. This subset of reals is bounded on the left side, but it does not have a minimum. It has no first time. This is trivial to prove. This set is not “infinite in the past”. It is bounded in the past, e.g. is it not “infinite in the past”. Thus Craig’s arguments do not apply to this set. Consider: if it did apply to this set, then it also applies to the 1 minute in the past I just experienced, which by reductio ad absurdum makes it wrong. I see no reason offhand why this cannot be the accurate description of time.

…

@anteprepro

3. Kroos is right that Hitchens was a blustery, warmongering Islamophobe.

Insofaras “Islamophobe” is well-defined (which arguably it’s not), and independent of whether “Islamophobe” is a euphemism for racist, politely disagreed. As far as I recall, most everything he said about Islam which wasn’t about using military to invade random countries I’m all on board with. Then again, I also say that any Roman Catholic who calls themself a Roman Catholic is in small part aiding and abetting child rape, and if the Catholic is informed then they are in small part willingly aiding and abetting child rape. This position also tends to ruffle some feathers.

I think they have the rights to be protected from abuse and cared for by their parents and protected from harmful substances and poisoning/mutilation just like other children.

Do you think that one person has the right to use another persons’ organs without that person’s consent?

If yes, then argue that point.
If not, then recognize that an abortion doesn’t violate any rights of the fetus (even if we accept that the fetus is fully human, with all the same rights as a baby).

Kroos #654

My point was that we do apprehend/perceive these moral truths like “killing babies for fun is wrong” , however we come to them.

“Moral truths” is begging the question. “Moral positions” or “opinions“, I would agree with. You haven’t established that they can, in any reasonable way, be called “truths”.

I will agree that people come to moral positions. I do not agree that this process can reasonable be considered perception, nor that the positions are “truths”. You’ll need to provide some kind of evidence or argument for that.

Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaidensays

These “perceptions,” according to you, are analogous to eyesight and are compatible with empiricism. However, “intuition” is not remotely similar to eyesight, and is incompatible with empiricism. In fact, empiricism explicitly disavows any notion of “intuition”.

My point: what are you doing under JS’s ‘nym?

Your position is a completely muddled mess.

Not necessarily. While Kroos relies on arguments like:

However appealing to this belief isn’t really empiricism. Its a spontaneous belief formed from our perceptions, just as peceiving this chair causes me to believe the chair objectively exists.
Some people may deny that the chair objectively exists.
You can say that I might be hallucinating , or all of sensory experience is an illusion (which some schools of mysticism teach) , but clearly teh default position is taht it objectively exists unless there is good evidence to teh contrary.

Which states that appealing to a sense whose accuracy has been empirically verified to form a null hypothesis that a current sensation is accurate isn’t empiricism and therefore we have a choice between “sensory experience” [which phrase is connected to ethical and meta-ethical beliefs how?] being illusion or believing Kroos knows morality is objective and we’ve just got to trust that until we disprove it.

When he goes on to say:

I was being vague with ‘perception’ to not exclude anyone else who had a different view of how we apprehend moral values and duties. My point was that we do apprehend/perceive these moral truths like “killing babies for fun is wrong”, however we come to them.

Kroos wasn’t necessarily being muddled: this could have been a deliberate choice to attempt to deceive people if Kroos assumed that all persons are as easily deceived as William Lane Craig devotees.

A consistent attempt to deceive and confuse isn’t a muddled mess. It only appears as one if one assumes that argument was made in good faith.

So back to you, Kroos: Are you deliberately deceptive, or are you so incompetent as to not understand how saying that many come to a moral conclusions as something other than a “sensory experience” completely undoes your argument that your Super Meta-Morality Sense must be trusted til proven wrong?

I was AFK and came back to say what it turned out you had already said. No need repeating it, I thought, but I was a little surprised to see my thinking right there on the screen without my having typed it.

Kroos may very well be lying, but enough people have addressed that

Fair enough. I said it more out of hope that Kroos would be outraged enough to deny just the possibility that those statements amounted to deliberate deception. I’m sick of the disingenuous side-stepping.

Seriously, NASA would be well managed if it would simply recognize the interstellar exploration possibilities derivable from designing a vessel with human life support capability and installing Kroos’ GoalPostDrive.

I was AFK and came back to say what it turned out you had already said. No need repeating it, I thought, but I was a little surprised to see my thinking right there on the screen without my having typed it.

Ah, k. I thought you were accusing Kroos of posting under my name. Your actual intent makes much more sense.

So at best, we have 19 major cosmologies. 7 specifically mention an infinite past. So just with simple counting, 64% of the modern cosmological theories don’t have clear stances on infinite time in the past. 0% of modern cosmologies specifically mention a finite past. Many of these theories are interrelated and are better understood as variations of each other. For example, cyclic theory originated from the 1920 oscillating universe theory and some forms of it reduce back towards Big Bang. Big Bang has been updated multiple times since 1927 and its portrayal in the popular press frequently ignores the variations within its modern construction. Some theories on this list, such as Einstein’s 1917 constant universe, are already abandoned.

This pattern of theories makes sense. Most of the theories focus on a handful of starting assumptions and build from there. For example, Friedmann didn’t seem to care as much about the finiteness of time and worried more about the shape of the universe. His geometric emphasis doesn’t require time to be finite or infinite. On the other hand, cyclical theory intentionally was written for time to be infinite and appears to be compatible with any geometry that allows for continuous cycling.

In other words, in essence, all Richard Carrier does is define morality to be the science of getting what you want.

no he doesn’t define it that way. rather, finds that something like that is the only thing that fits the definition.

We simply have different understandings of what these words mean. I do not recognize his “morality” as morality. Consequently, I do not believe he has bridged the is-ought gap.

just for a second, i’ll taboo the word “morality” because you really want to keep your own version of that word.

now, what richard carrier gave is what should actually be done, as a matter of fact, in a situation where we have a choice of what to do. and he gets this from facts of what “is”. so what he gave does bridge the “is-ought gap”.

you can go on to claim that we ought to do your thing instead, but you will be incorrect, or at best greatly in need of supporting your claim.

In a metaphorical way, […] If you can reduce morality to mere material facts, then that’s not morality.

F*** this
The level of ineptitude in this thread is getting worse and worse.
@alwayscurious
I don’t know if you know how science works but sometimes with scientific progress they abandon old models and move on to new ones. A lot of the pre-1980 models you mentioned were abandoned because of new scientific evidence. To pretend that something Hoyle’s steady-state model is still viable is incorrect.
The Borde Guth Vilenkin paper proved the steindhart/Turok model and the inflation models had a beginning. there are a lot of problems with teh cyclic models anyways.

“I’ve said before I use empirical evidence all the time and it is compatible with my worldview.
However appealing to this belief isn’t really empiricism. Its a spontaneous belief formed from our perceptions, just as peceiving this chair causes me to believe the chair objectively exists. ”

These “perceptions,” according to you, are analogous to eyesight and are compatible with empiricism. However, “intuition” is not remotely similar to eyesight, and is incompatible with empiricism. In fact, empiricism explicitly disavows any notion of “intuition”.

NO I explicitly said it wasn’t empiricism if you read my post. I was analogizing how sense perception spontaneously gave us belief in the existence of the external world to how moral beliefs about the objectivity of moral truths formed

I’m giving up on the moral argument. None of you guys have shown any ability to put forth any kind of plausible epistemology to justify moral claims or to understand what I’ve said regarding perception and belief in the external world or objective truths.
There’s a lot of circular arguments. like “I trust my senses because I tested them” . Unless you found some way to directly beam the information directly into your brain, you tested them with your senses , and you could be a brain in a vat for all you know . That would be analogous to me testing my moral perceptions against my other moral perceptions and concluding they were reliable. If you say something like you’re not sure, well no-one’s sure of anything but they can come to reasonable conclusions about whether the external world or morality exists. Man

@Amphiox

2. The moment the term “objective” is included, you automatically go to the MOST EXCLUSIONARY mode possible, since “objective” implies just one right and real way to the exclusion of all others which are wrong.

Yes that’s what I’m saying. Its objectively wrong to kill babies for fun. Are you saying there’s a right and moral way to kill babies for fun? That we should not exclude other opinions on killing babies for fun?

I’m giving up on the moral argument. None of you guys have shown any ability to put forth any kind of plausible epistemology to justify moral claims or to understand what I’ve said regarding perception and belief in the external world or objective truths.

None of you guys have shown any ability to put forth any kind of plausible epistemology to justify moral claims or to understand what I’ve said regarding perception and belief in the external world or objective truths.

I’d say the problem is that you haven’t done anything other than repeatedly assert your opinion. Every time we try to ask questions or raise objections, you just ignore what we say, refuse to answer or change the subject.

Just on this page, and just counting my own comments, you have yet to address comments #516, #566, #585, #609 and #668.

Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaidensays

2. The moment the term “objective” is included, you automatically go to the MOST EXCLUSIONARY mode possible, since “objective” implies just one right and real way to the exclusion of all others which are wrong.

Yes that’s what I’m saying. Its objectively wrong to kill babies for fun. Are you saying there’s a right and moral way to kill babies for fun? That we should not exclude other opinions on killing babies for fun?

How daft can you get?

No one here has explicitly said that killing babies for fun is moral. We’re not objecting to the ethical claim.

We’re objecting to the meta-ethical claims that
1) ethical conclusions are objective
2) ethical conclusions are “perceived” in a way analogous to sight, which was required by your argument that if we, by default, trust sight, we must, by default, trust your meta-ethical conclusion that all ethical requirements are objective
and
3) a meta-ethically objective moral system would be evidence in any way, shape, or form that any god exists, much less that any specific god exists.

You are confusing an ethical statement
– one should not kill babies for fun –
with a meta-ethical statement:
– The statement that one should not kill babies for fun has an objective reality –
and a meta-meta-ethical statement:
– The objectivity of ethics is directly perceivable by human beings in general, and specifically by Kroos Control.

Stop pretending that disagreement with your meta-ethics constitutes a willingness to endorse baby-killing-for-fun.

Stop pretending that a refusal to conditionally and situationally endorse baby-killing-for-fun is a concession to the truth of your meta-ethical and meta-meta-ethical assertions.

I do not accept that it is “metaphysically impossible”. I do not accept that things that come into being necessarily require an explanation / cause / whatever. Do you have evidence or argument for that proposition? I again state that it seems preposterous, but it seems equally preposterous to posit something outside of time. Have you ever seen something outside of time? I haven’t.

I made an argument from the PSR earlier you can address.
But it Ex nihilo , nihilo fit. Basic metaphysics. Your desk is here because there was some wood with teh potential to become a desk and a carpenter with the ability to bring it about.
But nothing doesn’t have the potential to become anything or bring about any state of affairs.

As for timeless things , some metaphysicians posit things like mathematical objects and logical truths exist timelessly. We’re inside of time so we can’t see it. But we can conceive of a timeless state of affairs where everything is frozen eternally

You’re not very good with math, are you?
Again consider this description of time: t∈{x|x∈R|x>0}. Equivalently: all t in set { x | x in Reals and x > 0 }. This subset of reals is bounded on the left side, but it does not have a minimum.

I see. I mistinterpreted. but the universe would still be finite into the past. it would come into existence , since the only way it would not have come into being would be if it extended eternally into the past .

This set is not “infinite in the past”. It is bounded in the past, e.g. is it not “infinite in the past”. Thus Craig’s arguments do not apply to this set.

I was talking about how you appealed to branches and said time may have been infinite in the past

Read your own damn post: “I’ve said before I use empirical evidence all the time and it is compatible with my worldview.” Except your worldview has exactly nothing to do with empirical evidence.

I was analogizing how sense perception spontaneously gave us belief in the existence of the external world to how moral beliefs about the objectivity of moral truths formed

And that is not a valid analogy; I’ve gone over this.

None of you guys have shown any ability to put forth any kind of plausible epistemology to justify moral claims or to understand what I’ve said regarding perception and belief in the external world or objective truths.

You haven’t put forth any kind of epistemology. Your entire argument boils down to “I assume that my intuitions about morality are accurate.” In fact, we’re gonna go back to my second comment in this whole debacle*: “It’s quite a leap to assert that those people are correct. Actually, given that many of those people disagree, and strongly, those people (by and large) cannot be correct; objective morality that disagrees with itself is a contradiction. Given that majority of people perceiving their morals as objective must be incorrect, it follows that its entirely possible that all of them are incorrect. At the very least, it establishes that the perception of objective morality is a very unreliable method of determining objective morality.”

As well as this comment by me: “So the morals one might perceive as objective are not really objective. After all, there exists a separate standard by which to measure morals, and this separate standard can disagree with one’s perception and is superior (else it could not give one reason to think one’s perception is false).”

You never did get around to explaining this separate standard.

I’ve gone around with circles to you; the problem is that you keep asserting premises that are simply not justified. There is no reason to accept “moral perceptions” as accurate.

There’s a lot of circular arguments. like “I trust my senses because I tested them” . Unless you found some way to directly beam the information directly into your brain,[1] you tested them with your senses , and you could be a brain in a vat for all you know .[2]

1) Dear lord. You test them against themselves, to ensure consistency with themselves. Then you test them against the senses of others, to ensure consistency between others.

2) That’s entirely true. It’s technically possible.

The funny thing is, if you assert that your “moral sense” is analogous to our senses (it isn’t), all of these objections apply to your “moral sense” as well, except for one thing: there’s nothing remotely reliable about your moral sense.

You mean the complete inability to understand the written word, regardless of language?

Cause I think it came across that if Kroos was persona non grata, by definition Kroos would be unable to enter into or remain within Pharyngula-space, and that no communication by Kroos would be officially acknowledged in any way, but that since Kroos is clearly hanging out here and commenting, Kroos cannot be persona non grata, thus Kroos writes shit that Kroos either doesn’t understand or actually believes false in more languages than simply English.

None of you guys have shown any ability to put forth any kind of plausible epistemology to justify moral claims

YOU most certainly haven’t put out any kind of epistemology to show how you know any moral claims are true. You “intuit” morals. “Intuition” is no kind of epistemology at all.

The BEST you’ve done is to propose one extreme example (“killing babies *for fun* is wrong”) and think you’ve shown it is objectively established as a moral “truth,” merely because MOST (but not all) people intuit the same as you or have a similar “Ewww!” reaction. You haven’t described WHY it would be immoral to kill babies, or to kill babies *for fun* and you most certainly haven’t shown or argued for any “way of knowing” that the proposition is “true,” and you have not shown any truth value beyond consensus.

The most telling thing against your position is that you rely on the God of the Christian Bible as the outside arbiter of what is morally right and wrong, in an unalterable, immutable, permanent sense. And yet, right there in the Christian Bible is an example of your God ordering human beings to kill babies for fun (and profit). In addition, of all those whose views have been expressed (via quotation rather than direct participation himself) in these couple of threads, the ONLY person portrayed as justifying genocide (and killing babies for fun) is your hero, William Lane Craig. So much for your vaunted “objective” morality — it goes completely out the window, depending on what God says. The problem is, no one has access to any knowledge of any god, or of what any god says, or of what any god may have prescribed as “objective” moral precepts. You keep SAYING that you “perceive” God-given morality directly, but you have no mechanism or faculty via which any such “perception” can be made.

Anything that I know is dependent in the first instance on sensory experience. Human beings at a preverbal stage have access to physical sensory experiences. If the human beings don’t have, or are deprived of, these sensory experiences that tell them about the physical world, they don’t develop normally. Very young human beings don’t have language, or long term memory, or complex reasoning as yet. Much of the behavior of neonates is instinctive. It isn’t reasoned, but it is physical. That’s how we receive and process, in the first instance, any information or knowledge at all about the world. Human beings who don’t perceive (sensorily, physically), at least approximately correctly, about the physical reality around them, end up dead.

Human beings are social animals; we live together in societies. Unless we all want to become extinct, there have to be ways of interacting with one another that don’t kill all of us. Because we are dependent, and inter-dependent, we have to rely to some extent on others in the social group in order to survive. So it doesn’t make any sense to hurt, injure, or kill those upon whom our (and our mutual) survival depends.

When you couple sensory experience, e.g., pleasure and pain, with social necessity, there HAVE to be rules about how to live together. We know what hurts us, and we know that such pain is a harbinger of what will kill us physically if we are not careful. We can see other people around us. We can tell when they are experiencing pain because we have had similar experiences, and we can compare what they are doing with what we did when we had pain. Certain bodily attitudes are common among organisms in pain (grimace, crying, reflexive avoidance, inability to use a body part, limping, cradling, etc.) We can therefore recognize that what hurts us hurts others as well. We have bonds of kinship and dependence, and we cannot do everything (or maybe we can do hardly anything) ourselves, so reciprocity, fairness, the “Golden Rule” (don’t hurt others as you wouldn’t like to be hurt, do treat others as you would like to be treated ) helps us interdependent animals help one another to survive. If there were no such social rules, and if everyone wantonly hurt others willy nilly, or killed them, or stole their food or other resources, then the whole human enterprise founders and we are extinct.

Providing wellbeing for one another, and avoiding inflicting pain on one another, is born of sensory experience and the physical reality of interdependence. What other means are necessary to determine social mores?

As the concept of kinship has expanded beyond the familial group, or the tribe, or the clan, or the city-state, or the nation, to all of humanity, why shouldn’t the rules include everyone, instead of dividing human beings into in-groups and out-groups? As we expand our recognition of just how interdependent we are on one another, globally as well as locally, why shouldn’t reciprocity or the golden rule be extended to all humanity?

I don’t see what’s wrong with such a derivation of knowledge (born of and grounded in basic sensory experience and socialization) of what is “right” and “wrong.” What is “right” and “wrong” consists of rightness or wrongness of action toward other human beings. It is born of interactions and inter-dependence. It means to enhance wellbeing of a greater number of human beings, and to reduce the pain and suffering of a greater number of human beings. You don’t need anything beyond the golden rule to get to that. And the golden rule is a human/social animal construct arising from interdependence and physical experience.

That’s funny, Kroos, because no one here has advocated killing babies. And the discussion of abortion would stop as soon as you answered the question beyond arguing “pregnancy is unique because I said so!”.

You want to go back to simply masturbating over “objective morality”? Fine, I’ll leave you alone as soon as you answer these questions for me:
1) Do you know the difference between a fetus and a baby?
2) Why are you willing to grant more rights (in this case, compelling another to provide life support) to a fetus than every other born person?
2a) Should parents be allowed to take a newborn off of life support?
2b) Do you believe that parents should be legally obligated to provide blood/organs/tissue to their offspring? If not, why not?
3) Should a pregnant woman face legal penalties for smoking/drinking to excess/abusing drugs/eating soft cheese/eating cold cuts/taking cold meds/etc etc etc. If yes, what?

YOU are the one who keeps bringing up “killing babies *for fun*.” The ONLY person/being/entity described who thinks that killing babies for fun is morally okay — even mandatory — is the God of the Bible. The ONLY human being here who endorses or justifies killing babies for fun is (as described in his apologetics) William Lane Craig.

Outside-originated, totally-objective-regardless-of-what-an-individual-thinks, immutable, and reliably-intuitively-perceptible permanent moral absolutes *should* help us solve not only the easy cases, but also the hard ones. If there really were such a thing as totally-obviously-perceptbily-reliable moral intuitions, as our means of access to such “objective” moral rules, then it should be easy for everyone to agree what the right thing to do is, regardless of whether the issue is at the extremes or in the middle. People should be able to reliably perceive what is right in virtually all cases. How do you explain that they don’t?

YOU bring it up, YOU blatantly misuse and abuse it as an argument, and when the conversation doesn’t go the way you wanted, since people here aren’t stupid and can see right through your shallow, dishonest, pretentious shit, you try to run away from the topic YOU raised, like a whipped puppy?

And liar AND a coward. You are pathetic.

Tiresome? Every lying word you’ve written since you showed up here has been tiresome.

Whoa! I was just joking I wasn’t serious about the babykilling. I can talk about babykilling till the cows come home.
@maddog1129
The point is that everyone does [to use your words] agree killing babies for fun is the wrong thing to do is, regardless of whether the issue is at the extremes or in the middle. People are able to reliably perceive that killing babies for fun is wrong in virtually all cases.
@Alexandra
Hey no fair! I answered like 2 of your question and you never answered any of mine.
One

You mentioned certain American laws. In certain states there are laws against a pregnant woman abusing certain harmful substances that can cause birth defects , developmental disorders and mental retardation in the baby. In your view is this OK, or does bodily autonomy imply the woman allowed to do whatever she likes regardless of the consequences to the foetus/baby?

So your idea of an objective moral framework is so obvious, so easy to see, that to provide an example of its obviousness, you had to narrow down from murder to murder of babies, and then add the further caveat that you only meant “for fun”?

People are able to reliably perceive that killing babies for fun is wrong in virtually all cases.

People might reliably conclude that, but
1) whether it’s a perception or a conclusion is at issue here: don’t assume the conclusion
2) you are trying to use this claim as evidence for a completely different, meta-ethical claim: morality is objective.

So, even if I granted you that “people” reliably conclude for-fun baby killing is wrong in “virtually” [conditional added only after it was pointed out that the only person contributing to this discussion even directly to suggest that baby killing can be a totally moral thing is WLC] all cases – and I’m feeling generous on granting this premise, it seems reasonable – you have in no way established that:

1) that’s a process of perception, not conclusion
2) that near-unanimity is proof of or even evidence of the [proposed/asserted] objective nature of morality.

Try, just for once, to lay out a logical progression of how near-unanimity on *one* moral issue, that is nonetheless hedged with conditionals, is evidence for, much less proof of, the objective nature of morality.

1) You never actually answered anything, KC. You gave a standard (and easily refuted) anti-choice argument, then argued that PREGNANCY IS UNIQUE BECAUSE IT IS. Hardly compelling.
2) My responses have fuck all to do with your arguments against abortion. I never agreed to quid pro quo* and I find it pointless with someone who is simply looking for a “gotcha!” to prove what a horrible &/or inconsistent person I am. You’re terribly transparent.

So your idea of an objective moral framework is so obvious, so easy to see, that to provide an example of its obviousness, you had to narrow down from murder to murder of babies, and then add the further caveat that you only meant “for fun”?

People are able to reliably perceive that killing babies for fun is wrong in virtually all cases.

This really does come to the heart of what morality is.

Morality is the code of conduct that works toward the definition of society. If you can define the society you wish to live in, you can define the morality that leads to that society.

This is evident from a simple thought experiment. Say you were marooned on a desert island, alone. What is morality? It basically isn’t anything at all. You can do what you want, with only your own personal concerns and choices. Morality effectively doesn’t exist.

Now, say another person washes up on the beach. How do you deal with this other person? You can either force them to conform to your ideas of behavior, and be a dictator, or you can work with them to develop a system of living together that is more-or-less mutually acceptable. (Of course, they may force you to conform to their idea of behavior. That could happen.)

Once you are rescued, you may be judged based on your behavior by those who have a different idea of what constitutes a good society. And that’s what happens in the real world. We judge behavior based on the behavior of our ideal good society.

And this is morality.

So there may be an objectively-best morality, but only if there is an objectively-best society. Meanwhile, we all work toward what we think is the best possible society, and in that way, we work out our own morality.

There are some things that are shared amongst most societies, like the idea that killing babies for fun isn’t a good thing. It’s because the kind of people who kill babies for fun aren’t good for any society. Those things that aren’t good for any society are your basic “objective” morals, because that’s what morality is: the things we do to get along in society.

Revelation has no part to play in morality. At best, that’s merely law. At worst, it’s an excuse to behave badly, counter to what’s best for society and the individuals that make up society.

A lot of the pre-1980 models you mentioned were abandoned because of new scientific evidence. To pretend that something Hoyle’s steady-state model is still viable is incorrect.

You obviously didn’t read my post all the way through, because I go on to say:

Some theories on this list … are already abandoned.

Thank you for the link to Vilenkin’s paper. I also found two more by Vilenkin on the same topic in the mean time. While it appears that “beginnings” may be inadvertently written into the current crop of continuous models, “Does the universe have a beginning?” is still an open question in physics. Now I need to go back and reread yesterday’s physics post in light of everything I just learned.

For a successful parody the things you write have to actually represent reality, not what you want to be reality. Pro tip for you there, champ.

Have you found those VALID and UNJUSTLY ridiculed anti woman arguments yet? Care to share? Or is it more sound and fury signifying yet more nothing from you?

Do you even realise that the claim “a valid anti abortion argument exists” negates, at some point in its construction, the full agency of women, the full bodily autonomy and integrity of women? It’s a logical consequence of that argument. It necessarily entails that at some point the woman’s agency, bodily autonomy and integrity are sublimated in favour of some other thing. But you’re 100% pro choice eh? You’re too fucking pigshit thick to see the consequences of your own claims.

If you shift the goalposts to “valid anti abortion argument for an individual” i.e. a subjective reason for an individual not to have an abortion, then sure these exist. A trivially obvious fact. Do people take those subjective reasons seriously? Sure. Should they be ridiculed for them? In my view, no. But then that is not what you said is it.

You made the claim that a VALID (logically coherent, evidence supported, rational etc) argument can be made that demonstrates at some point that a woman’s agency, bodily autonomy and integrity could and should be removed or violated in some fashion at some point in her pregnancy. And that such arguments have been unjustly, by virtue of…well their virtues, ridiculed. You’ve been repeatedly asked for these arguments and repeatedly failed to deliver them

Not impressive, Chas. But you keep telling yourself yours is the superior position. What a laughable fuckwit you are.

We are agents. Agents take actions. What actions do agents take? The first question that any agent has to answer is: Do I do something? Do I do nothing? What do I do?

I take it as given that every rational agent answers that question by: I have certain goals. I will tak actions to achieve those goals. I take actions which I calculate as likely to achieve those goals.

This then begets two additional questions: What are my goals? How do I decide which actions are likely to achieve specified goals?

I take it as given that any sane, rational agent answers the second question with: evidence, science, inductive reasoning (Bayesian reasoning), risk-benefit analysis, and other equivalent formulations.

I take it as given that any good, just, and moral agent answers “What are my goals?” with “to achieve happiness, material wealth, safety, self-determination, and the other values of humanism, for myself, and for my fellow conscious creatures – other minds.”

It seems that it’s self-evident to Richard Carrier that the answer is not that. Richard Carrier apparently takes it as self-evident that an agent will answer “What are my goals?” with “to acehieve happiness, material wealth, safety, self-determination, and the other values of humanism, for myself, and only myself.”

That’s the difference. Richard Carrier wants to define words like “should”, “ought”, and “morality” in terms of his self-evident goals. I want to define those words in terms of my self-evident goals. I can find a link where I had a back-and-forth with Richard Carrier where he might this quite clear IMHO.

Either way, I do not see how you can bridge that gap. Again, what gap am I talking about? The universe is the way it is no matter how we feel about it. We can take actions to change it, but mere make-believe and willful delusion does not change what is. One kind of statement is how the world is. These are descriptive statements of our shared material reality. A second kind of statement is how we want the world to be, or how the world should be. These are proscriptive statements, or values, or morality, or however else you want to call it. I refuse to recognize any argument which has 1- premises of mere neutral description of our shared reality, and 2- a conclusion about what I should want, or what the world should be, etc. It is simply a non-sequitur to go from “The aura is blue” to “I should push the button”, and every single attempt to bridge the is-ought is exactly as erroneous as that inane argument. To you, your argument seems plausible only because you have a hidden premise, such as “I should be happy”, or “I should not starve”. Once you adopt a hidden premise like that, then of course science takes you the rest of the way.

Sam Harris basically holds to my position, although he loathes this formulation of it. Sam Harris argues – and I think quite rightly – that someone who refuses to use science and evidence is just as insane as someone who refuses to choose actions according to the values of humanism (“well-being”). He really hates the is-ought gap because in his mind he sees that most people understand it as privileging “is” statements as more special or more “objective” or more “rational” or more “justified” than morality statements, which is simply false. I agree with him, but I feel that the most honest and constructive way to approach these arguments is to take it head on, explain that there is a hidden premise whenever someone attempts to bridge the is-ought gap, and then argue that the hidden premise “we should be good to each other” is just as self-evident and just as unjustifiable as “we should use evidence and science” and that so-called material descriptive scientific statements are no more special than any moral statement.

…

@Kroos Control

I made an argument from the PSR earlier you can address.
But it Ex nihilo , nihilo fit. Basic metaphysics. Your desk is here because there was some wood with teh potential to become a desk and a carpenter with the ability to bring it about.
But nothing doesn’t have the potential to become anything or bring about any state of affairs.

Again, the only way to respond to a presuppositionalist is “Sorry, I do not accept that premise”. I do not accept your premise. Your naked assertion is not an argument. I do not accept it as true. I am unconvinced.

I am not convinced that “out of nothing only comes nothing”. I am not convinced that my desk can only exist because there was “the potential” or whatever the hell you have.

I see. I mistinterpreted. but the universe would still be finite into the past. it would come into existence , since the only way it would not have come into being would be if it extended eternally into the past.

I see you flunked high school math. Let me repeat myself – again. On this model, time is bounded in the past, but there is no first time. There is no first point of time, and thus there is no need of a cause of that first time which exists outside of time. There is no first time. There is no time where it “came into existence”. It never “came into existence” because there is no first time. “Came into existence” implies a time where it “came into existence”. None of your “first cause” arguments apply to this rather simple model. The problem is your sloppy English prose and refusal to work in terms of the math.

…

@Kroos Control

None of you guys have shown any ability to put forth any kind of plausible epistemology to justify moral claims or to understand what I’ve said regarding perception and belief in the external world or objective truths.

The key part that you need to realize is that by your own rules (which I also subscribe to), you cannot either. Your god does nothing to solve the problem. Why should the existence of your god make any more difference than my existence? Why is your god special w.r.t. morality? Because you say so? Why can’t I say that I’m special w.r.t. morality? I hope your answer is not some variant of “might makes right”. Protip: “Because it made the universe” is either a non-sequitur or a “might makes right” argument, or some equivalently stupid argument which appeals to some equivalently stupid value which I do not hold. Again, I fear I am one post away from repeating “I’m sorry – I do not accept that premise.”

When I’m killing babies I make sure to have a serious face on at all times. I used to put crocodile clips on my testicles to make things uncomfortable, but found that the pain too pleasurable so I cut them off to use as windchimes.

No no no no. Chas is here in his capacity as super intelligent person (a claim tragically opposed by available data) to enlighten we mere mortals about the many ways we are wrong. Look at the nitpicking he has done, Esteleth’s erroneous declination of the plural of foetus for example. A devastating critique by Chas illustrating the wrongness of so many things. I have it on good authority that Esteleth fell to her knees in supplication and penance as a result (this never happened).

Chas’ stunningly adroit declamation that valid and unjustly ridiculed anti woman arguments exist has been roundly mocked by all, but oh how we lowly mortals sneer at our better. Chas in his winged chariot of superiority deigns to inform us these mythical beasts exist but like a kindly father,refuse to actually tell us what they are, joyously permitting us to wonder. He then scolds us for not accepting his glorious word.

But ah! Alas and alack! We sorry villeins, we grist to Chas’ mightily mill of the mind, we dust beneath his wit clad feet are merely a cloister of cowardly group thinkers. Bound in a chamber of echoes, bidden by our terrible, comfortable, correct liberalism to only think certain things and chatter in agreement. The possibility of any group of people having any other route to similar opinions, ideas and conclusions is risible to the Great Chas. For he and he alone sees further.

Praise him! He comes with the Dawn to show us the Way! And it is a fearful way. A way beset with delusions of adequacy, thought the depth of a puddle of spit, insight so deep it could penetrate a molecule thick layer of transparent gas, and complexity so terrifying a toddler would solve its more terrifying puzzles in an instant and wonder what the fuss was about. It is the Way of Chas. The Way of the Pointless Fuckwit.

I’m thoroughly entertained by the fact that others were able to show that even some of the nine best things I could find from Kroos were also flawed. And of course in the midst of that, Kroos issues out a condescending whine about how inferior our intellects are in comparison to the Almighty, Persecuted Kroos, and how Kroos gives up because we simply cannot grasp the Wise Missives from Kroos, The Great and Powerful.

I get the impression that, somehow, by either entering churches, voting Republican, or both, all of your sense of self-awareness is just sucked right out of your skull. I don’t know the mechanism, but you can’t argue with the obvious results.

@brianpansky
You’ve linked to Richard Carrier. I’ve read it again. I don’t know what a “hypothetical imperative” is, and how you think it can bridge the is-ought gap. Can you give a brief example please? It might make this easier for me to show that you have a hidden premise and/or the argument is invalid.

I see nothing in here yet which attempts to bridge the is-ought gap. What I see is a lot of philosophical wankery about “objective morality” vs “subjective morality”.

Hell, from what I can tell, the whole point of of Foot’s paper – the whole point of hypothetical imperatives – is that you cannot justify morality – morality is not “categorical imperatives”, and thus the is-ought gap is not bridged. What am I missing here?

@Alexandra
I was trying to ask question for the same reason you (I assume) were trying to ask me questions. To get you to justify some of your claims.

@Enlightened liberal
You’re the most logical guy here. I think you really get what I’m saying , even when you disagree
With respect to the causal principle , I made an argument from teh PSR that I references

Starting with the observation that once we admit that some contingent states of affairs have no explanations, a completely new skeptical scenario becomes possible: no demon is deceiving you, but your perceptual states are occurring for no reason at all, with no prior causes. Moreover, objective probabilities are tied to laws of nature or objective tendencies, and so if an objective probability attaches to some contingent fact, then that situation can be given an explanation in terms of laws of nature or objective tendencies. Hence, if the PSR is false of some contingent fact, no objective probability attaches to the fact.Thus, we cannot even say that violations of the PSR are improbable if the PSR is false. Consequently, someone who does not affirm the PSR cannot say that Koons’ skeptical scenario is objectively improbable. It may be taken to follow from this that if the PSR were false or maybe even not known a priori, we would not know any empirical truths. But we do know empirical truths. Hence, the PSR is true, and maybe even known a priori.

I’ve got more , but what do you think of this.

wrt respect to the time , I definitely do understand what you are saying. There is no first moment. However there is still a first finite interval of the universe’s existence and the universe can be plausibly said to have begun. (As an aside , did you get that idea from somewhere? Its wierd because Bill Craig has actually defended a similar view of the origin of time in a book.)

the view which I have defended myself in print, namely, that the singularity is simply an ideal point. And what this implies, then, is simply that there is no first instant of the beginning of the universe, even though there is a first finite interval of the existence of the universe.

With respect to morality. I believe God is by defintion the greatest concivable being and by definition a being worthy of the highest praise and worship. As such it is greater for him to be the ultimate standard of morality to conform to such a standard. Its in the definition of God.

I swear Kroos says this and as soon as this draws the attention of the person Kroos certifies as “most logical”, it leads to Kroos getting shown to be foolish by that person, and then Kroos moving onto another “you’re the most logical one”. It’s happened at least three times before this.

I believe God is by defintion the greatest concivable being and by definition a being worthy of the highest praise and worship. As such it is greater for him to be the ultimate standard of morality to conform to such a standard. Its in the definition of God.

And the definition of a six thousand tonne raspberry-flavoured marshmallow asteroid is that it is an asteroid made of raspberry-flavoured marshmallow, with a mass of six thousand tonnes. So what?

With respect to morality. I believe God is by defintion the greatest concivable being and by definition a being worthy of the highest praise and worship. As such it is greater for him to be the ultimate standard of morality to conform to such a standard. Its in the definition of God.

Except your deity is imaginary, absolutely no conclusive physical evidence for it, so all you have is your delusional belief that your deity exits. You can’t build any logical argument from such a delusional thinking.

I just find it dubious that you could use claims to bodily autonomy to execute another person. IMO its a very morally relevant difference between just withholding treatment and having someone poisoned/dismembered.
The question about substance abuse while pregnant was to see if you recognized any restrictions on bodily autonomy on the woman due to the unborn child.

Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaidensays

The poster known as myintx is really fucking irritating. (Not to mention, thicker than a fucking brick, and twice as dense.)

To wit:

First – When a woman has a abortion, she is not controlling her own body, she is controlling the body of another human being – controlling it so much that it is KILLED.
Second – But, if by controlling ‘her own body’ you mean using her own body to kill another human being, do you support her killing her unborn child at 35 weeks? Or using ‘her own body’ to drive her car into the ocean with her kids inside?

So? If a baby was in the hospital hooked up to machines for survival with no brainwaves detectable through EEG, but doctors said it would have brain waves within 24-30 weeks there wouldn’t be people advocating to kill that human being.
An unborn child IS a human being. brain waves do not a human being make. You’re coming up with excuses to justify selfish killing of a human being. sad.

Self-directed growth.. i.e. with proper nutrients and shelter a human being grows on its own through all the stages of human development – embryo, fetus, newborn, toddler, etc.
A cell in your bone marrow won’t grow into an embryo, fetus, etc even with proper nutrients and shelter… because it’s not a human being.

Her whole schtick is calling women SELFISH and IRRESPONSIBLE because WHAT ABOUT TEH PRESHUS BABBIES!!!!ELEVENTY-ONE!!!!

Countdown for Chas responding to you by sneering and making veiled tone-trolling invectives (of the “you are just as bad as fundamentalists and slymepitters for not following my Straw Vulcan directives”)… in 10… 9…

I just find it dubious that you could use claims to bodily autonomy to execute another person.

I find it dubious to call a blastocyst a person. I find it dubious to assert that rights do NOT change with the developmental stage of human life.

You *do* find it reasonable to deny voting rights to a 32 week fetus, don’t you?

What about an 11 year old child?

Speaking of which, do you calculate your age from birth or from conception? Have you ever bothered to figure out your conception date? Do you celebrate that date or your birth date more often?

Or do you count back an extra few weeks to moment of creation of the sperm that fertilized an ovum at the fertilization stage of your development?

How do you feel about subjecting 3 year olds (however you calculate it) to the draft in a time of war? Why should extra 20 year olds have to die so that more 3 year olds can live? You think a 3 year old can’t pull the pin on a grenade?

Which is all to say:
1) if you believe in different levels of rights according to developmental stage, but fail to include that calculation when weighing the rights of pregnant persons, you don’t even believe in the moral standards by which you live…or you believe that there are different, lesser, moral standards for persons that can become or currently are pregnant than apply to people who are knowingly unable to become pregnant.

2) If you **don’t** believe in different levels of rights according to developmental stage but fail to acknowledge that just about everyone on the planet perceives morality different from you, you are lying about how universal and how objective your moral standards are.

Please answer the question: do you believe in different levels of rights according to developmental stage?

Of course everyone misunderstood my post.
EL asked how God would be relevant to morality if he existed. I pointed out that by definition God is teh greatest conceivable being , so he would automatically be the standard of morality if he existed and was the greatest.

I pointed out that by definition God is teh greatest conceivable being , so he would automatically be the standard of morality if he existed and was the greatest.

No. Greatest is subjective. What is greater, vanilla or chocolate? Which is greater, Hitler or Ghandi? (HINT: Hitler was greater if you measure by power, Ghandi if you measure by humanity.)

Further, there are different Gods. Are we talking about the eternal mind that created the cosmos? Then that God might be distant and detached, as any deist could tell you. Or are we talking Allah, or Yahweh? In which case, which is greater?

No. Your very definitions refute your assumptions.

Ultimately, the standard of morality is simply this: What kind of person do you wish to be?

It reminds me of something Dan Dennett once said about consciousness. He said that many people believe that if we can explain it, then it’s not consciousness. “Consciousness is magic” they would say. In a metaphorical way, that applies to my position on morality. If you can reduce morality to mere material facts, then that’s not morality. “Morality is magic (very loosely).”

So you’re intentionally taking the view that Dennett was ridiculing? It’s sort of funny and sort of pathetic at the same time. Have fun with your magical thinking, then. Oh, excuse me, you’re only saying metaphorically that there are things about human feelings and actions which aren’t material facts. Clear as mud. My bad, of course — sometimes sophisticated theology is just too sophisticated for people like me to understand right away.

KC:

But nothing doesn’t have the potential to become anything or bring about any state of affairs.

It doesn’t need to have the potential to become anything or bring about any state of affairs. It’s not anything. But that can mean two different things: (1) this is by definition an impossible state, because it does not have what must exist, even if that is only some abstract laws of logic or other truths, or (2) that whatever must be the case is, it exists in the full the sense of the word and not simply in the sense that a law of logic “exists,” even when there is a state we’re referring to as “nothing.” So where has anyone ever shown that it can’t be that some physical things must exist? Why is it that theists never actually demonstrate anything at all when it comes to this, but only make a bunch of assertions?

As for timeless things , some metaphysicians posit things like mathematical objects and logical truths exist timelessly. We’re inside of time so we can’t see it. But we can conceive of a timeless state of affairs where everything is frozen eternally

So you agree that “nothing” must include things like logical truths, or else it must be inconsistent, so we’re not using the first meaning I gave above. So you have no grounds at all to claim that other things can’t also exist, because this nothingness supposedly doesn’t have the “potential” to “bring it about” — since in no way have we found any reason to believe that having been brought into existence by something else is a requirement of existence itself. Nor have you shown that these other things which must exist (laws of logic, mathematics, or any other abstract truths about existence like, e.g., quantum mechanical laws) aren’t capable of “bringing it about” if that’s what you really think is missing. But I think what you really believe is missing is your version of Jesus, your version of a Christian god, your version of an afterlife, your version of a soul, and so on. Maybe you could explain that.

I just find it dubious that you could use claims to bodily autonomy to execute another person.

Oh, loaded language!
How is a fetus a person?
How is abortion “execution”?

By your metric, a woman who was being raped would be morally (and legally) culpable if she killed her rapist in self defense. You really want to go there?

IMO its a very morally relevant difference between just withholding treatment and having someone poisoned/dismembered.

You have yet to answer why I (or anyone else) should put my body at risk for another person. Why doesn’t my so-called “right to life” influence your thinking in the least?

You know, I don’t know your sex. Do you have the ability to get pregnant? Have you had an abortion or carried a pregnancy to term or both?

And what is the “morally relevant difference”? I have never donated bone marrow– there is the distinct possibility that someone has died due to my inaction. A terrible, slow, painful death. This person would have been mourned for by the people they loved, and yet that’s somehow morally better than ending a pregnancy?

As far as I know (and I’m only an expert in that, you know, I’ve carried a pregnancy to term), fetuses spend their 9 months in utero in a state of (at least partial) unconsciousness. They do not experience anything on the level that you and I do, especially when we’re talking about first trimester fetuses who are barely developed in any way. They simply do not experience pain or comfort or (if we’re being sappy) love. They do not bond with anyone. They have no memories, no intelligence, no likes or dislikes.

And yet you afford them more consideration than a person who has loved ones and hobbies and a job and pets and all of that interconnectedness that real, live, born people have. Why is that?

The question about substance abuse while pregnant was to see if you recognized any restrictions on bodily autonomy on the woman due to the unborn child.

You do realize that the VAST majority of American women drink during their pregnancies, right? What should happen to all of those women?

“What’s your standard for logic?”
“Well, ya see, we need to lick the tear drops from the most logical man on Earth…”

“What’s your standard for temperature measurement ?”
“I just check my thermometer for difference in degrees Celsisus, with each one representing 1% of the heat needed to get water from freezing to boiling…”
“HERETIC! TOP-DOWN PROCESSES ONLY! BURN HIM!! BURN HIM!!!”
“No, I meant I calibrate according to the Sun! THE SUN!! AIIIIIIIIEEEE!!!!”

It seems that it’s self-evident to Richard Carrier that the answer is not that. Richard Carrier apparently takes it as self-evident that an agent will answer “What are my goals?” with “to acehieve happiness, material wealth, safety, self-determination, and the other values of humanism, for myself, and only myself.”

Nope, he’s not promoting selfishness. This is plainly wrong. You need to read him more carefully.

Sam Harris basically holds to my position, although he loathes this formulation of it.

You’ve consistently argued against realism. If “my position” refers to your meta-ethical position, then no, Harris does not agree with your position. If you think this is about some other kind of position, it may be true but it isn’t relevant.

Hell, from what I can tell, the whole point of of Foot’s paper – the whole point of hypothetical imperatives – is that you cannot justify morality – morality is not “categorical imperatives”, and thus the is-ought gap is not bridged. What am I missing here?

Try not reading your own position into everyone else’s. They don’t all agree with you, nor do they use terms just the way you would casually use them, because you’re so very very right about everything. That is one thing you’re missing.

The question about substance abuse while pregnant was to see if you recognized any restrictions on bodily autonomy on the woman due to the unborn child.

You do realize that the VAST majority of American women drink during their pregnancies, right? What should happen to all of those women?

Well, we certainly shouldn’t let the bodily autonomy of US women override the Natural Law Imperative of brick walls to fall when tipped off their foundations by a bulldozer or stones to fall when reaching the top of a parabolic flight arc. I mean, just because a woman’s slut’s body is in the way is no reason to act against the objective imperatives of the universe, amirite?

The same part where it opposes slavery, opposes child abuse, opposes rape, opposes genocide, endorses capitalism, and tells us to vote Republican. The Gospel According to Jesus, I think. It’s right after Revelations but before The Gospel According to Reagan.

Oh! More things to avoid while pregnant have come to mind:
– soiled kitty litter
– over the counter anti-nausea medicines
– lifting more than 25 lbs (last trimester)

Where does the line get drawn? Since none of these (with the exception of some of the prescription meds) will guarantee miscarriage/birth defects, do we hold women responsible while they’re pregnant or do we wait to see if the kiddo has any adverse effects after birth?

Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaidensays

Where does the line get drawn? Since none of these (with the exception of some of the prescription meds) will guarantee miscarriage/birth defects, do we hold women responsible while they’re pregnant or do we wait to see if the kiddo has any adverse effects after birth?

Well, that depends: are we talking pregnant white women? Does she have enough money to make a prosecutor actually prove the case in court?

And this is all because god has the largest conceivable penis; and therefore, if he exists, which he does because we believe we can conceive of him, he is the greatest fucker around. (That happens to be the same way we know what he thinks, and why we know what he thinks is true.) So don’t fuck with him, or actually, with us.

Can’t argue with that logic. Really, you can’t. There’d have to be some logic to it first, in order to argue with it.

The secret’s in those godly words of El Shaddai’s I posted somewhere up there ^. That font of morality has no problem at all with eating babies, but you can’t do that if you go an terminate, can you? So, the answer according to that particular god is you have to have the baby in order to eat it! Voila and all that. Or something.

@maddog1129
The point is [ sic ] that everyone does [to use your words] agree killing babies for fun is the wrong thing to do is, regardless of whether the issue is at the extremes or in the middle. People are able to reliably perceive that killing babies for fun is wrong in virtually all cases.

I think you misunderstand what I mean by extreme and middle. I’m talking about cases in which particulars are so extreme and so detailed that the answer is almost guaranteed. It’s like asking a leading question, i.e., a question with the answer already suggested or built in. What I mean by “middle” moral cases is one in which rights or interests may be competing, such that moral answers are not clear. Such situations occur all the time in everyday life. In extremely defined situations, there is no moral dilemma. Those are the easy questions. Where people have competing rights and interests, moral dilemmas arise and the answers are by no means readily discernible. You have not attempted to address how your “intuitive” “perception” of “objective” morality helps anyone resolve anything other than absolutely extreme and easy cases. If there really is such a thing as externally-generated, absolute, unchanging moral precepts to which we have ready access and understanding, then there should be few, if any, moral dilemmas, and there should be much more agreement among human beings about what the right answers are in hard cases. That is not what we see, however. People who believe in God are no better able to resolve moral dilemmas than anyone else.

YOU picked “killing babies for fun” as the hypothetical situation to test people’s moral sense/intuition/perception. That is an EXTREME case, because (1) human beings, (2) mass or at least multiple murders (plural victims), (3) emotional appeal to babies, and (4) it would have to be done “for fun.” These features are what also make it an EASY case. This is not a “middle” case; the deck is heavily emotionally stacked in favor of the evaluation that killing in an exceptionally egregious, exceptionally callous, exceptionally catastrophic, exceptionally heinous way is “morally wrong.” Even at the extreme edge, where such evaluations should be easy, notice a couple of things:

First, YOU are saying, at best, that “killing babies for fun is wrong in virtually all cases .” So you are allowing that there are SOME circumstances in which “killing babies for fun” is NOT morally wrong. Which cases are you accepting, when it is morally okay to kill babies for fun?

Second, the only ones we’ve talked about here who get this extreme, and easy, case wrong are (a) the God of the Bible, (b) the Bible authors, and (c) William Lane Craig. Those are YOUR allies, and they are getting it wrong. These are the same ones who get lots of other easy moral questions wrong: it’s wrong to own another human being as property, for example. God seems to think slavery is just fine, and supposedly says not a single word against it. The writers of the Bible (purportedly speaking for God and laying out God’s “objective” morality) never say a word against it. Apologists for God, like William Lane Craig, justify and excuse slavery. The sources YOU are relying on get the easy questions wrong.

And, as noted, you haven’t provided any help whatsoever in how to intuit or “perceive” the absolutely objective moral answer when cases are HARD.

Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaidensays

And this is all because god has the largest conceivable penis; and therefore, if he exists, which he does because we believe we can conceive of him, he is the greatest fucker around. (That happens to be the same way we know what he thinks, and why we know what he thinks is true.) So don’t fuck with him

argumentum ad baculum?

Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaidensays

The relevant moral right is the right to life , not the right to vote or get drafted. Are you trying to say younger humans have lesser rights to life than older ones

We humans have rights by virtue of being persons. @727, you said:

I just find it dubious that you could use claims to bodily autonomy to execute another person.

You’re treating the fetus as if it is a person.

Before I go any further, I’ll state-again-that it doesn’t matter if the fetus is a person with the same rights as every other human being. No human being has the right to make use of the body of another human being without their consent.
You cannot force someone to give blood, even if it will save the life of someone else.
You cannot force someone to donate organs, even if it will save the life of someone else.

You want more examples of bodily autonomy being violated?
Slavery and rape.
Humans are not property. We are all people, with the right to decide what happens to and with our bodies. To deny another human being this right is to treat them as if they’re less than human.
Rape is non-consensual sex. The act of rape is a horrific violation of the bodily autonomy of another human being.

Forcing an individual to donate organs or blood violates their bodily autonomy, which is a basic human right.
Denying an individual their bodily autonomy-by rape or enslavement- necessarily results in that individual being treated as less than human.

Every anti-choice/forced birther argument I’ve seen, whether religious or secular, results in women being denied this basic human right. They result in women being treated as subhuman.

People are asking you why fetii get special rights bc you and so many of your ilk treat fetuses as if they have the right to override the bodily autonomy of pregnant women. No other human being has this right, as many people have pointed out over and over and over again. No deceased human being has this right. As no living or deceased human being has the right to make the use of another humans’ body, why does a fetus get this special right?

Is there sufficient justification to grant fetii this right?
Is there sufficient justification to enslave women?

One of the forced birth arguments is abortion is against god’s will. First and foremost, there is insufficient reason to believe in any deity. As a result, there is no reason to follow the so-called teachings of any deity. Second, even *if* we grant that your god exists, he hardly has a problem with killing babies. Several people have quoted excerpts from the bible attesting to this. I’ve already mentioned the genocide your horrific butcher god committed during the flood. That killed a lot of fetuses (along with infants, children and adults). Third, even *if* your god exists, mere existence is insufficient reason to adhere to his desires. There are probably more flaws in this forced birth argument, but my points above are sufficient to counter their argument.

Should we deny women their right to bodily autonomy because some people worship a deity whom they think is opposed to abortion?

http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~mfarah/Neuroethics-Personhood.pdf
The earliest explicit definition of personhood came
from the sixth-century philosopher Boethius, who equated
a person with “an individual substance of a rational nature”
(Singer 1994). Cognitive capacities such as rationality have
remained important features of most subsequent accounts
of personhood,
1
including the two most influential accounts
of personhood, those of John Locke and Emmanuel Kant.
For Locke, there were three essential characteristics of
personhood: rationality, self-awareness, and the linkage of
this self-awareness by memory across time and space. In
his words, a person is “an intelligent being that has reason
and reflection, and can consider itself the same thinking
being in different times and places” (Locke, 1997). Kant’s
formulation also includes intelligence, but mainly for its
role in enabling one to act morally. At the heart of moral
action, for Kant, was the ability to distinguish between
persons and things and treat them accordingly. Whereas
things may be valued because they are desirable or useful,
persons have an intrinsic value, in Kant’s terms a “dignity.”
In his words “ every rational being exists as an end in
himself and not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used
by this or that will . . . rational beings are called persons
inasmuch as their nature already marks them out as ends
in themselves” (Kant 1948)

{…}

A few other contemporary definitions of personhood
will be quoted here for the sake of indicating their funda-
mental similarities, both in the human traits singled out as
relevant to personhood and in the difficulty of translating
any of these sets of traits into operational criteria for decid-
ing which entities are persons and which not. From Tooley
(1972): something is a person “if it possesses the concept of a
self as a continuing subject of experiences and other mental
states, and believes that it is itself such a continuing entity.”
From Feinberg (1980,189): “persons are those beings who
are conscious, have a concept and awareness of themselves,
are capable of experiencing emotions, can reason and ac-
quire understanding, can plan ahead, can act on their plans,
and can feel pleasure and pain.” From Englehardt (1986,
107): “What distinguishes persons is their capacity to be
self-conscious, rational, and concerned with worthiness of
blame or praise.” From Rorty (1988, 43): “A person is
…(a)
capable of being directed by its conception of its own iden-
tity and what is important to that identity, and (b) capable of
interacting with others, in a common world. A person is that
interactive member of a community, reflexively sensitive to
the contexts of her activity, a critically reflective inventor of
the story of her life.

[…]

Please note that there is no definition of ‘personhood’ that is agreed upon universally. That said, there are several qualities of personhood that can be agreed upon. How many of the various qualities of personhood does a fetus possess?

This isn’t a complete list of personhood qualities. I’m not certain such a list exists. The above link does, however, discuss many of the attributes associated with personhood. Do fetii possess any of these qualities?

No, they don’t.
Fetuses are not people. They do not possess rights.
Women are people. Women possess rights. Included among those rights is the right to bodily autonomy. Forcing women to remain pregnant violates this human right and treats women as less than human while granting the fetus a right no one else possesses (a right, by the way, that is lost once born).
Moreover, even if you can find a comprehensive list of the qualities necessary for personhood…even if fetii possess those qualities, don’t forget no human being has the right to use the body of another person without their consent.

So no, the relevant right is *not* the right to life (even if that *were* the relevant right, fetii wouldn’t have it bc they aren’t people). The relevant right is the right to bodily autonomy (a right that fetii do not possess either, bc they aren’t people).

Please stop advocating for a position that denies women their full status as human beings. Arguing for god’s existence or the greatness of William Lane Craig as you’ve been doing makes you look foolish, uninformed, intellectually dishonest, and gullible, but that doesn’t bother me.

What bothers me is arguing against a woman’s right to choose. In doing so, you earn more than my mockery. You earn my utter contempt and disgust you fucking dipshit.

The article was written by
Martha J. Farah, University of Pennsylvania
Andrea S. Heberlein, Harvard University

The portion of their article I quoted began here:

The earliest explicit definition of personhood came
from the sixth-century philosopher Boethius, who equated
a person with “an individual substance of a rational nature”
(Singer 1994). Cognitive capacities such as rationality have
remained important features of most subsequent accounts
of personhood,
1
including the two most influential accounts
of personhood, those of John Locke and Emmanuel Kant.
For Locke, there were three essential characteristics of
personhood: rationality, self-awareness, and the linkage of
this self-awareness by memory across time and space. In
his words, a person is “an intelligent being that has reason
and reflection, and can consider itself the same thinking
being in different times and places” (Locke, 1997). Kant’s
formulation also includes intelligence, but mainly for its
role in enabling one to act morally. At the heart of moral
action, for Kant, was the ability to distinguish between
persons and things and treat them accordingly. Whereas
things may be valued because they are desirable or useful,
persons have an intrinsic value, in Kant’s terms a “dignity.”
In his words “ every rational being exists as an end in
himself and not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used
by this or that will . . . rational beings are called persons
inasmuch as their nature already marks them out as ends
in themselves” (Kant 1948)

{…}

A few other contemporary definitions of personhood
will be quoted here for the sake of indicating their funda-
mental similarities, both in the human traits singled out as
relevant to personhood and in the difficulty of translating
any of these sets of traits into operational criteria for decid-
ing which entities are persons and which not. From Tooley
(1972): something is a person “if it possesses the concept of a
self as a continuing subject of experiences and other mental
states, and believes that it is itself such a continuing entity.”
From Feinberg (1980,189): “persons are those beings who
are conscious, have a concept and awareness of themselves,
are capable of experiencing emotions, can reason and ac-
quire understanding, can plan ahead, can act on their plans,
and can feel pleasure and pain.” From Englehardt (1986,
107): “What distinguishes persons is their capacity to be
self-conscious, rational, and concerned with worthiness of
blame or praise.” From Rorty (1988, 43): “A person is
…(a)
capable of being directed by its conception of its own iden-
tity and what is important to that identity, and (b) capable of
interacting with others, in a common world. A person is that
interactive member of a community, reflexively sensitive to
the contexts of her activity, a critically reflective inventor of
the story of her life.

[…]and ended above.

The following was my only comment:

Please note that there is no definition of ‘personhood’ that is agreed upon universally. That said, there are several qualities of personhood that can be agreed upon. How many of the various qualities of personhood does a fetus possess?

I pointed out that by definition God is teh greatest conceivable being , so he would automatically be the standard of morality if he existed and was the greatest.

Your god pales in comparison to beings far greater than him: the vast majority (if not all) of
humanity.
We are greater than your god.
We are more moral than your god.
Your god is an immoral, genocidal monster.

If god is the greatest conceivable being, does that also include what cats would conceive of as greatest? Because, in that case, god must have as many laps as there are cats. I was just reminded of this by one of my cats giving me reproachful glares because I was letting the other cat occupy my lap when she wanted to curl up on it.

I know you insist that the beginning of your recent string of bannings was also the beginning of all your bannings and that you are not associated with ‘nyms that were banned years ago. Whether or not PZ was right to ban you for that particular sin a few days ago, once banned changing ID to evade the ban violates the Pharyngula rules. PZ enforces this consistently and effectively. That your comments show up on a thread that is “unmoderated” is no excuse for using name changes to attempt to trespass in PZ space where PZ has denied you permission to go.

You’ll be banned again. It won’t be inconsistent. It won’t be undeserved.

It won’t be too soon.

Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaidensays

A Noyd
Actually, God being the greatest conceivable cat kind of makes sense; as long as you’re scratching His ears and giving Him treats He’s happy with you, but if you scratch another cat He’ll shove his way in and take a swipe at you to teach you a lesson, and if you run away, it activates His predator reflexes and He’ll pounce on you and torture you to death. He can’t help it, it’s just in His nature is all.

So, Kroos Control believes that a foetus has the right to make use of a person’s body; that KC believes this is incontrovertibly clear from their comments throughout both this thread and the previous one on abortion.
.
We note that no born person has the right to make use of another person’s body; nobody can be compelled to donate so much as a drop of their blood, much less the use of their entire body for about 9 months (at considerable risk to the donor’s health and life, and at the cost of prolonged and extreme disruption and discomfort to the donor and also at the cost of excruciating pain to the donor such that under any other circumstances it would be recognised as per UN definitions as torture). We note that a person – a father, for example – cannot be compelled to donate his blood/bone-marrow/kidney etc. etc. even to his own three-year-old son, even if his son will die without it and he (the father) is the only match in the world.
.
KC persists in their refusal to answer the question:

Why should a foetus have more rights than a born person?
(And bearing in mind that organs can’t even be taken from a corpse unless consent was explicitly granted prior to death – why should a living woman have less right to bodily autonomy than a corpse?)
.
Kroos Control has finally, after countless reiterations, at least gone so far as to hint at a justification for this refusal: KC claims that this is a “loaded question”.
.
KC, can you please explain on what grounds you aver that this is a loaded question?

The cat-table-lap-rock-candy-mountain god of the hobo-cats is staring to sound a bit, well… um… silly. Is maximum conceivable silliness another necessary part of this god?

Also does this conception deal work like you can conceive different bits at one time and add them together as a running tally, and god is however far you get before you run out of greatest things or die? Or do you have to conceive all the bits at once and whatever you can hold in your head at one time is the greatest, even if stuff got left out because there just wasn’t room?

Also, I just peeled the biggest, stinkiest tonsillolith I’ve ever seen out of my right tonsil, but I’m sure I could conceive of an infinitely bigger and stinkier one. I suppose I should add it to the god pile, right? Though, god should probably avoid getting it near his largest conceivable penis because, for all I know, it’s thrush and will give him the worst conceivable yeast infection the universe has ever known.

I don’t think fetuses/babies have any extra rights. I think they have the rights to be protected from abuse and cared for by their parents and protected from harmful substances and poisoning/mutilation just like other children.

If I had to reword I’d say they have the right to an appropriate level of care , relative to their developmental stage from their parents that other children do.

under any other circumstances it would be recognised as per UN definitions as torture

You should probably stop saying this

Under the United Nations Torture Convention of 1984, torture involves intentional infliction of pain, by a public official, to obtain information.

(And bearing in mind that organs can’t even be taken from a corpse unless consent was explicitly granted prior to death – why should a living woman have less right to bodily autonomy than a corpse?)

I’m not really a fan of corpse rights.

Now a question for you
Your post seems to assume the woman’s right to bodily autonomy is so absolute that it outweights any effects on the foetus.
Have you ever heard of a drug called thalidomide that causes birth defects? Children could be born with arms or legs missing.
Hypothetically lets say a woman took thalidomide against the advisement of her doctor and her baby was born without arms. Would this be a valid exercise of her bodily autonomy? Or should there be some restrictions when it can affect the life of the foetus/unborn child?

Hypothetically lets say a woman took thalidomide against the advisement of her doctor and her baby was born without arms. Would this be a valid exercise of her bodily autonomy? Or should there be some restrictions when it can affect the life of the foetus/unborn child?

Non-sequitur bullshit from a bullshit artist, without a point.
Show us conclusive physical evidence your imaginary deity exists.
Show us conclusive physical evidence that a fetus has more rights than the fully human woman carrying it.
Where the fuck is YOUR evidence?

I don’t think fetuses/babies have any extra rights. I think they have the rights to be protected from abuse and cared for by their parents and protected from harmful substances and poisoning/mutilation just like other children.

1) Fetuses, unlike babies and children, are by definition inside pregnant people. Stop equivocating these terms.
2) Babies and children don’t have the right to the use of a parent’s body to keep themselves alive.

If you believe abortion should be banned, you necessarily believe fetuses should have that right. This is a right that NOBODY else has, ever. Every time it’s ever come up in a court, the right to bodily autonomy has been upheld. You cannot both be for abortion bans and be against fetuses having more rights than born people. These are mutually exclusive positions.

@Alexandra
I’ve not been responding because you haven’t been answering my questions , so its seems like you’re only interested in going one way.

I suppose maybe in a circumstance where the parent was the only match in the world it could be argued for donation but its not really relevant.

I was thinking of how to show that the analogy with organ donation was a false analogy. (I attempted to do this with my analogy when I killed someone to take back the kidney). But I saw a good explanation last night.
If the child in that case died , they died because of their ailment. They died because of Lukemia , their state of health. They did not die because the parent had them dismembered /crushed/vacuumed or poisoned. there’s a clear difference.

Abortion is in-itself an act of killing the death of the child by intention, is intrinsic to the procedure as evidenced by the fact that the death of the child is procured regardless of his or her state of health. The child in the womb could be the healthiest baby in the world, and still an abortion in which he or she is the victim, will kill that baby.

For instance, can you show us any evidence that any god has ever existed? You claim that question cannot be answered because the scientific method is a failure, or that we cannot trust our senses. Which is weird, because the scientific method helps us get around our sensory limitations.

Abortion is in-itself an act of killing the death of the child by intention,

Fixed that for you loser. A fetus isn’t a child. A child has a birth certificate. When you anti-choice fuckwits keep making the same stupid exaggerations of definitions over and over, you look even more stupid by repeating your corrected stupidity. It’s like you won’t learn.

If the child in that case died , they died because of their ailment. They died because of Lukemia , their state of health. They did not die because the parent had them dismembered /crushed/vacuumed or poisoned. there’s a clear difference.

You know what also has a clear difference? The child with Leukemia isn’t living inside the mother’s body, using her organs to survive.

Either way, saving the child requires a violation of the other person’s bodily autonomy – if we don’t allow it for organ donation, why do we allow it for pregnancy?

Abortion is in-itself an act of killing the death of the child by intention, is intrinsic to the procedure as evidenced by the fact that the death of the child is procured regardless of his or her state of health.